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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2015 Schism and Sacred Harp: The Formation of the Twentieth-Century Tunebook Lines Sarah E. Kahre
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COLLEGE OF MUSIC
SCHISM AND SACRED HARP:
THE FORMATION OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY TUNEBOOK LINES
By
SARAH E. KAHRE
A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy
Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2015 Sarah E. Kahre defended this dissertation on March 25, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were:
Charles E. Brewer Professor Directing Dissertation
Amanda Porterfield University Representative
Douglass Seaton Committee Member
Sarah Eyerly Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this dissertation has been a long and sometimes painful process, and I am grateful to my family and friends who have encouraged, consoled, or distracted me as needed. The Sacred Harp community has also been a wonderful source of support, and I thank all the singers in Tallahassee and beyond who have discussed my ideas with me, or even just said they want to read the document when it is finished. Hey guys, guess what? My quest for tunebooks and other sources has lead me to work with many wonderful institutions, including the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University, the Alabama State Archives, Texas State University, and my alma mater, Appalachian State University. The backbone of my research came from a memorable weekend spent living in the Sacred Harp Museum in Carrollton, Georgia, which the Sacred Harp Publishing Company was kind enough to allow then-librarian Charles Woods to open up to me. I have also been fortunate enough to have individuals share copies of resources from their private collections, including Jonathon Smith and Robert Lee Vaughn. Robert and I exchanged a number of emails at a critical time for me; our conversations not only informed my work on the Cooper book, but they helped me feel more confident in my ideas and less alone as a scholar. I owe many thanks to my wonderful committee members: Dr. Seaton (editor extraordinaire), Dr. Porterfield, Dr. Von Glahn, who unfortunately was not able to continue through the final semester, and Dr. Eyerly, who happily stepped in. But most of all, I am very grateful to my major professor, Dr. Brewer, who has guided me, encouraged me, supported me, and generally put up with me for the last five years. This document would not have been possible without him.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Musical Examples ...... v List of Figures ...... viii Abstract ...... ix
1. INTRODUCTION: SOUTHERNERS AS IMMIGRANTS ...... 1
2. THE HOMELAND AND THE OTHER: SOUTHERN TUNEBOOK TRADITIONS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR ...... 28
3. THE COOPER SACRED HARP: THE FIRST TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVISION ...... 53
4. CASE STUDY: WOMEN AND THE ALTO IN SACRED HARP ...... 75
5. THE J. L. WHITE AND JAMES SACRED HARP EDITIONS: PROGRESSIVISM AND RETROSPECTION ...... 95
6. CASE STUDY: THE MANY REVISIONS OF “BOYLSTON” ...... 119
7. EPILOGUE: THE SACRED HARP DIASPORA ...... 129
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 141
Biographical Sketch ...... 151
iv LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES
2.1 “Yarbrough” ...... 31
2.2 “I’m Going Home” ...... 32
2.3 “Gospel Trumpet” ...... 33
2.4 “Missionary Hymn” ...... 34
2.5 “Emma” ...... 36
2.6 “Ninety-Third Psalm,” The Southern Harmony ...... 39
2.7 “Ninety-Third,” The Christian Harmony ...... 39
2.8 “Lenox,” The Southern Harmony ...... 40
2.9 “Lenox,” The Christian Harmony ...... 41
2.10 “Lynn” ...... 42
2.11 “Bartholday” ...... 43
2.12 Felix Mendessohn-Bartholdy, Lied ohne Worte op. 38 no. 6, mm. 6-11 ...... 43
2.13 “We’ve a Mansion in Heaven” ...... 44
2.14 “Mear,” The Sacred Harp ...... 47
2.15 “Mear,” The New Sacred Harp ...... 47
2.16 “Newman,” The Sacred Harp ...... 48
2.17 “Newman,” The New Sacred Harp ...... 48
2.18 “Lenox,” The New Sacred Harp ...... 49
2.19 “Howe” ...... 50
2.20 “Oh, How Glad!” ...... 50
2.21 “Oh, How I Love Jesus!” ...... 51
3.1 “Glory Shone Around” ...... 61
3.2 “Dear Name! The Rock on Which I Stand” ...... 62
v 3.3 “Be Saved To-Night” ...... 63
3.4 “Lord, Save” ...... 63
3.5 “Will You Come?” ...... 64
3.6 “Crown Him Lord of All” ...... 65
3.7 “The Crucifixion” ...... 66
3.8 Antonín Dvořák, Symphony no. 9, mvmt. 1, mm. 24-27, horn III ...... 67
3.9 “Florida Storm,” chorus ...... 68
3.10 “The Lord’s Promise” ...... 70
3.11 “Long Ago, Comrades” ...... 71
4.1 “Sherburne,” Daniel Read, 1785 ...... 80
4.2 “Bridgewater,” Lewis Edson, 1782 ...... 82
4.3 “Anthem for Easter: The Lord is Risen Indeed,” William Billings, 1787 ...... 82
4.4 “Liberty,” from The New-England Harmonist (1800), excerpt, mm. 6-10 ...... 84
4.5 “Liberty,” from The Sacred Harp (1870), excerpt, mm. 6-10 ...... 85
4.6 “The Last Words of Copernicus,” alto by Minnie Floyd ...... 92
4.7 “Never Turn Back,” alto by W. R. McCoy ...... 93
4.8 “Carry Me Home” ...... 93
5.1 “Idumea,” fourth edition ...... 102
5.2 “Idumea,” 1909 fifth edition ...... 102
5.3 “New Britain,” fourth edition ...... 103
5.4 “New Britain,” 1909 fifth edition ...... 103
5.5 “Weeping Savior” and “Abbeville,” fourth edition ...... 104
5.6 “Weeping Savior” and “Abbeville,” 1909 fifth edition ...... 104
5.7 “Remember Me” and “Newman,” fourth edition ...... 105
vi 5.8 “Remember Me” and “Newman,” 1909 fifth edition ...... 106
5.9 Page 38, nineteenth-century engraved plate ...... 106
5.10 Page 38, new engraved plate ...... 107
5.11 Page 38, new plate, half engraved and half moveable type ...... 107
5.12 “Mendelssohn,” Original Sacred Harp ...... 114
6.1 “Boylston,” The Choir or Union Collection of Church Music (1835) ...... 121
6.2 “Boylston,” The Sacred Harp, fourth edition ...... 121
6.3 “Boylston,” The Sacred Harp (1902) ...... 123
6.4 “Boylston,” The Sacred Harp, fifth edition (1909 and 1910) ...... 125
6.5 “Boylston,” The Union Harp and History of Songs (1909) ...... 126
6.6 “Boylston,” Original Sacred Harp (1911) ...... 127
vii LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 Sacred Harp tunebook lines ...... 2
4.1 Puberty and marriage for men in late eighteenth-century Boston ...... 76
4.2 The range of the counter and the adolescent male voice ...... 77
4.3 Puberty and marriage for women in late eighteenth-century Boston ...... 78
4.4 Composers of all alto lines in the 1902 Cooper Sacred Harp ...... 92
5.1 1909 General Index ...... 109
viii ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores tunebook revisions in the broad Sacred Harp tradition during the period from 1879 through 1936. My work focuses on the split of Sacred Harp singing into three competing sub-traditions during the early twentieth century, forming singing communities in the South with diasporic traits. I will argue that, if one views all of Sacred Harp singing as a diasporic culture, then the center is the antebellum tradition of tunebook singing, embodied in the four original editions of The Sacred Harp published by B. F. White between 1844 and 1870. Sacred Harp singers were “exiled” when other tunebook compilers modified their styles after the Civil War in reaction to the growth of seven-shape and gospel style music, and then disagreements primarily related to stylistic issues caused the dispersal into three related tunebook lines during the early twentieth century. My ultimate goal is to better understand both this under-studied period of Sacred Harp history and the diasporic culture it produced. To that end, I will clarify what was valued (and devalued) and why by different editors and singing communities during the period from the death of B. F. White in 1879 through the publication of the first Denson edition in 1936. “Boylston” will serve as a case study to examine how different editors approached revising a stylistically problematic tune. I will also explore how musical styles found in different tunebooks may reflect particular cultural, political, and religious values associated with parts of the South after Reconstruction, with particular attention to the changing role of women. Ultimately, I will show how these different values fractured what had been a single tradition and promoted the formation of three distinct tunebook lines, a division that is still a feature of Sacred Harp practice today. Through the lens of diaspora theory, I will illuminate how, why, and along what lines this division occurred within the context of Southern history. Although Sacred Harp singing may not fit intuitively into classical conceptions of a diasporic culture, this perspective provides a way to understand the singers’ alienation within the broad tunebook singing practice and highlights the importance of history, tradition, and nostalgia to the formation of the identity “Sacred Harp singer.” Different responses to these values are key in the development of these new tunebook lines. Post- Reconstruction attitudes toward the antebellum past were generally mixed and complex across the entire South, so the metaphor of exile applied to this relatively small group could also contribute to larger conversations about Southern identity at the time, especially Southerners’ relationships to their history and the legacy of previous generations. This sense of diasporic identity within Sacred Harp
ix singing cultures has continued to the present day, producing anxieties documented by contemporary ethnomusicological studies of the now-international singing community.
x CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: SOUTHERNERS AS IMMIGRANTS
“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.” Jeremiah 6:16
In 1870, B. F. White (1800-1879) published the fourth edition of his popular Sacred Harp tunebook, the last edition to be published before his death. At the time, most other traditional Southern tunebook compilers were adopting various forms of seven-shape notation and promoting seven-syllable solmization.1 White was the only compiler to retain the older four-shape system. He responded to those who advocated for seven shapes in the preface to his final edition:
To those who are tenacious and scrupulous as to the different terms by which musical sounds should be expressed, allow us to say that we have carefully and earnestly studied the subject for forty-seven years, during the last twenty-seven years of which period we have been especially vigilant in seeking for musical terms more appropriate to the purpose than the names used in this book; but candor compels us to acknowledge that our search has been unavailing. The scheme which our prolonged and laborious examination has inclined us to prefer to all others has had the sanction of the musical world for more than four hundred years, and we scarcely think that, on this subject, we can do better than abide by the advice—“Ask for the old paths, and walk therein.”2
Although his paraphrase of Jeremiah 6:16 referred only to the retention of four-syllable solmization and the associated notational system, White’s words established that his Sacred Harp represented musical traditionalism, a stance supported by his own formidable experience as a singer and singing teacher. It would not modernize simply for modernization’s sake. The singers and teachers who followed in the Sacred Harp tradition took this conservative stance to heart, and by the twentieth century, Sacred Harp singing was unique among Southern tunebook hymnody traditions in its preservation of antebellum musical styles with their original four-shape notation and solmization. With the death of B. F. White in 1879, Sacred Harp singing lost its primary leader and tradition bearer, and Sacred Harp singing began to decline. A revival of the practice in the early twentieth
1 George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933, repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 323. 2 B. F. White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, fourth edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 1.
1 century was propelled by multiple leaders, disseminated from at least two locations, and involved multiple revisions of B. F. White’s fourth edition.
Figure 1.1: Sacred Harp tunebook lines
This dissertation explores tunebook revisions in the broad Sacred Harp tradition during the period from 1879 through 1936.3 My work focuses on the split of Sacred Harp singing into three competing sub-traditions during the early twentieth century, forming singing communities in the South with diasporic traits. I will argue that, if one views all of Sacred Harp singing as a diasporic
3 Italicized, Sacred Harp refers to a specific text or B. F. White’s original tunebooks. I also use italics when referring specifically to the culture surrounding B. F. White’s books (Sacred Harp singers) to signify that these were people who sang from The Sacred Harp when the book was one of many similar texts in rural America and the choice likely had as much to do with geography as anything else. Sacred Harp, without italics, refers to the tradition after its metaphoric exile when the act of singing from The Sacred Harp may be polemical, signifying a resistance to seven-shape and/or Gospel singing. Sacred Harp became an idea rather than simply a text, an important distinction. I also use it without italics when referring to all Sacred Harp singing, because most of Sacred Harp history now lies after the metaphoric exile. For the book’s revisions, I will either preface Sacred Harp with identifying information (Cooper’s Sacred Harp, Cooper’s 1902 Sacred Harp) or omit Sacred Harp and use the compiler’s name only (the Cooper book), a shorthand common among singers today. I will, however, avoid the equally common color designations (e.g. “the blue book”), because the color of the book covers has changed over time.
2 culture, then the center is the antebellum tradition of tunebook singing, embodied in the four original editions of The Sacred Harp published by B. F. White between 1844 and 1870. Sacred Harp singers were “exiled” when other tunebook compilers modified their styles after the Civil War in reaction to the growth of seven-shape and gospel style music, and then disagreements primarily related to stylistic issues caused the dispersal into three related tunebook lines during the early twentieth century. My ultimate goal is to better understand both this under-studied period of Sacred Harp history and the diasporic culture it produced. To that end, I will clarify what was valued (and devalued) and why by different editors and singing communities during the period from the death of B. F. White in 1879 through the publication of the first Denson edition in 1936. “Boylston” will serve as a case study to examine how different editors approached revising a stylistically problematic tune. I will also explore how musical styles found in different tunebooks may reflect particular cultural, political, and religious values associated with parts of the South after Reconstruction, with particular attention to the changing role of women. Ultimately, I will show how these different values fractured what had been a single tradition and promoted the formation of three distinct tunebook lines, a division that is still a feature of Sacred Harp practice today. Through the lens of diaspora theory, I will illuminate how, why, and along what lines this division occurred within the context of Southern history. Although Sacred Harp singing may not fit intuitively into classical conceptions of a diasporic culture, this perspective provides a way to understand the singers’ alienation within the broad tunebook singing practice and highlights the importance of history, tradition, and nostalgia to the formation of the identity “Sacred Harp singer.” Different responses to these values are key in the development of these new tunebook lines. Post- Reconstruction attitudes toward the antebellum past were generally mixed and complex across the entire South, so the metaphor of exile applied to this relatively small group could also contribute to larger conversations about Southern identity at the time, especially Southerners’ relationships to their history and the legacy of previous generations. This sense of diasporic identity within Sacred Harp singing cultures has continued to the present day, producing anxieties documented by contemporary ethnomusicological studies of the now-international singing community.
The Sacred Harp Diaspora
Describing Sacred Harp singing culture in terms of diaspora theory is not without precedent; my own conception of the Sacred Harp diaspora came from careful consideration and re-
3 formulation of a diaspora described by the ethnomusicologist Kiri Miller. In her book Traveling Home: Sacred Harp and American Pluralism, Miller uses diaspora theory to describe the dispersion of Sacred Harp singing across the country in recent decades. For her, the Sacred Harp diaspora is manifested in the attitudes and behaviors of so-called “nontraditional” singers who have come to Sacred Harp as adults living outside of the American South. These singers often view the Southern practice as ideal, emulate Southern singers (whom they revere as tradition bearers), and worry about how their possibly inauthentic practice may sully a perceived purity of the Sacred Harp tradition. Although never stated explicitly, it is implied that the “homeland” for this metaphoric diaspora is the South and the traditional Sacred Harp singing families who live there. As a Sacred Harp singer, however, I realized that many traditional singers share some of the traits that Miller identifies as diasporic, such as persistent nostalgia and apprehension about non-traditional practices. This would suggest that they, too, may be part of the metaphoric diaspora. As a student of the history of Sacred Harp, I also know that concerns were raised about the influence of outside styles generations before the practice ever left the South. I began to wonder, then, if perhaps the roots of diasporic attitudes among Sacred Harp singers lie deeper in the tradition’s past than the relatively recent trends that Miller identified. Miller’s use of the term “diaspora” to describe Sacred Harp singers does not indicate any familial, racial, or cultural tie to a geographic location and/or cultural group but rather is connected to a metaphoric dispersal that has produced diasporic traits within the culture of Sacred Harp singing.4 Her concept is developed from William Safran’s definition of diasporas as expatriate minority communities exhibiting most of six common traits: a dispersal to two or more peripheral regions, a collective memory of the homeland, a sense of alienation within the host society, a desire to return to the idealized homeland, a commitment to the maintenance of that homeland, and both a personal and communal identity shaped around connections to the homeland, which he calls “diaspora consciousness.”5 Miller then nuances this comparatively rigid definition with ideas from James Clifford, a critic of Safran who proposed that a “decentered diaspora” might form around objects, concepts, or traditions rather than a common national origin.6 For example, although global Jewish communities are Safran’s model for diaspora culture, Clifford observes that not all Jewish people want to return to Israel, nor have all Jewish people historically desired such a return. This
4 Kiri Miller, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 28. 5 William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1:1 (Spring 1991): 83-84. 6 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 269.
4 suggests that the literal homeland for the Jewish diaspora may not be the true center of the culture. Instead, one might understand the Torah as a text and symbol that binds the dispersed Jewish people.7 Just as this text is the symbolic homeland for the dispersed Jewish people, the Sacred Harp, specifically the nineteenth-century books of B. F. White, serve as the center for the Sacred Harp diaspora. Although many of the features identified by Miller make a compelling case for her application of the concept of diaspora, she focuses her attention on the diaspora itself and does not clearly propose the place, person, object, or idea at the center. Sometimes she implies that the South serves as a regional homeland; her discussion of members of Southern singing families as tradition bearers also suggests they may serve as the cultural center.8 In my experience, however, some of the diasporic traits described by Miller are not exclusive to new singers, suggesting that recent interest in Sacred Harp singing nationwide is not the original dispersal and that the diaspora includes traditional singing families as well as newcomers. Therefore, to understand the true source of the present-day diaspora consciousness observed by Miller, we must look further back into the history of Sacred Harp. To understand all of Sacred Harp singing as a diasporic culture, one must apply migration terminology to situations where there has been little or no physical migration. Until the last few decades, Sacred Harp singing has been practiced almost exclusively in the American South, and any small changes in the practice’s range within the region would not have pushed it into an area with a radically different culture. In diaspora and migration studies, however, it is often the reasons for and consequences of the migration, rather than the act of migration itself, that is of primary concern. If this were not the case, social scientists would not be so concerned with distinguishing between migrant cultures that are in a state of diaspora and those that are not, the primary goal of Safran’s definition of the concept. Diaspora is not simply a physical migration. Although migration and exile are usually key in diaspora formation, it should be understood as a cultural pattern produced by resistance to assimilation when displaced people find themselves surrounded by a new culture. I propose, therefore, that resistance to assimilation and the resulting cultural pattern are more important to the definition of diaspora than migration.
7 Clifford, Routes, 248; 275. 8 Miller, Traveling Home, 29.
5 People can feel uprooted without actually going anywhere. C. Vann Woodward’s The Origins of the New South: 1877-1913, published in 1951, was the first book to highlight Southern history after the end of Reconstruction, a period of tension and conflict between the urban and rural, the progressive and the traditional. In a 1958 essay titled “The Search for Southern Identity,” Woodward spoke of the difficulty mid-twentieth century Southerners had in maintaining a distinct regional identity, when many of the institutions that had distinguished the South from the rest of the nation had disappeared or were threatened with extinction, even if many did not merit any grief over their passing. He specifically compared the trauma of cultural change on the sense of Southern identity to the immigrant experience:
The same urge to conformity that operates upon ethnic or national minorities to persuade them to reject identification with their native heritage or that of their forebears operates to a degree on the Southerner as well. Since the cultural landscape of his native region is being altered almost beyond recognition in a cyclone of social change, the Southerner may come to feel as uprooted as the immigrant.9
Woodward was referring to the South of the 1950s, but that cyclone of social change was resolving conflicts often rooted in the late nineteenth century. After Reconstruction, the urban New South reformers sought to remake the region by combining the industrial and economic strength of the North with sometimes dubious ideas of Southern honor and tradition. Opinions on exactly how this would be accomplished varied over time and place. These leaders sometimes clashed with the middle-class landowning farmers, who were trying to preserve the old dream of living comfortably off their crops. Poor Southerners of both races were exploited for cheap labor, and white fear of the masses of emancipated slaves resulted in widespread lynchings and the implementation of Jim Crow laws. It was during this tumultuous period, when “Southern-ness” was being re-defined, that Sacred Harp was exiled from the cultural mainstream. Since there was no single cataclysmic event to exile Sacred Harp singing from the cultural mainstream, the diaspora consciousness developed differently and at different rates among various singing populations. I propose that Sacred Harp singing was and still is practiced within a continuum of attitudes between what I call “routine” practice and “retrospective” practice. In the antebellum period, Sacred Harp singing was primarily routine. More retrospective attitudes began to develop
9 C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity” in The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 15.
6 after the Civil War, as evidenced by the, “Ask for the old paths,” paraphrase in the fourth edition. Retrospection, and with it the growing diaspora consciousness, was more important to some Sacred Harp singers in the early twentieth century than to others, which produced different stylistic values in the three tunebook lines. For more routine singers, the value of singing Sacred Harp is primarily in the opportunity for fellowship, the act of worship, and/or appreciation of the music itself; nostalgia may play a role, but the connection to one’s ancestors or a mythical noble past is less likely to be emphasized. Antebellum Sacred Harp singing would have been a primarily “routine” practice, as a form of musical praise and fellowship that often occurred after church services and occasionally in daylong sessions with a connection to the singing school. This is not to say that nostalgia played no role in antebellum singing, but it seems to have been viewed as a much more active and dynamic tradition. The Sacred Harp itself has less symbolic significance to these singers, and as a result, they are more open to change. J. L. White (1847-1925) was probably the most “routine”-minded compiler of all, since he was fairly explicit in his intent to introduce modernizing elements into the practice of Sacred Harp while maintaining much of the core repertoire. W. M. Cooper (1850-1916) introduced gospel song, which also suggests a more “routine” attitude, although his intent was likely to make a book that reflected the music that people in his community were singing regularly rather than to push some kind of major reform. Joe S. James (1849-1931) was the quintessential “retrospective” singer, as evidenced by his emphasis on history and tradition. Although the Denson brothers later moderated his approach, retrospective attitudes are still very evident in their book. The Cooper singers, too, showed signs of increasing retrospection by the time their 1927 book was published, the first after the death of W. M. Cooper. The growing retrospective attitude of Sacred Harp singers is a sign of the growing diaspora consciousness, as the homeland of antebellum music and the accompanying mythologized lifestyle became more and more distant.
Survey of the Literature
Sacred Harp
Much has been written about the history of Sacred Harp singing, but there are some gaps, often the result of a Denson Sacred Harp bias evident in the majority of scholarly works. The most complete description of Sacred Harp history is Buell E. Cobb Jr.’s The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its
7 Music, first published in 1978.10 His fourth chapter gives an overview of the Sacred Harp revision history, and most of the initial groundwork for this investigation is drawn from it. This section is, however, only a chapter, lacking specific details. His study is additionally focused on the books themselves and less interested in the singers and other forces that shaped the tradition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cobb’s work was preceded by and relies heavily upon the groundbreaking scholarship of George Pullen Jackson, whose White Singers in the Southern Uplands, published in 1933, was the first major publication of any type on Sacred Harp singing and introduced Sacred Harp to the American musicological community as well as American folk scholars and revivalists such as the Lomax and Seeger families.11 Jackson’s description of the revisions cannot help but be incomplete, as the process was ongoing and his text predates the first Denson edition. Additionally, because he first made contact with James book singers, the Cooper book publishers would not speak with him, and he was unable to learn much about the Cooper book before publishing.12 He also erroneously states that there was little Sacred Harp activity in Mississippi, a misconception not corrected in scholarship until 1968, when John Quincy Wolf published an article on Sacred Harp singing in Mississippi.13 One other major work on Sacred Harp, John Bealle’s Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong, addresses how and why Sacred Harp has been labeled as folk music, even though its emphasis on literacy is contrary to what we generally understand as “folk” culture. Bealle does not work with diaspora theory, but he does describe ways in which the music of this tradition was repeatedly pushed out of the dominant urban cultures, beginning in New England not long after the Revolutionary War. He does not, however, address the revision history directly; his discussion of the early twentieth century focuses instead on authors such as Jackson who were beginning to describe Sacred Harp to academics and other outsiders, setting up the music as “folk” in the minds of Americans. One feature common to all three works is a strong Denson line bias. Jackson could not help but focus on the James book, as it was the only revision available to him, but Cobb and Bealle both made conscious decisions to prioritize the Denson tradition. In a timeline of revisions of The Sacred
10 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978). 11 An article titled “Buckwheat Notes,” published in The Musical Quarterly in October of 1933 (19:4, pp. 393-400) accompanied Jackson’s landmark book; it serves as a basic introduction to the topics covered in White Singers in the Southern Uplands. 12 George Pullen Jackson. White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes” (New York: Dover, 1965), 106-7. 13 John Quincy Wolf, “The Sacred Harp in Mississippi,” The Journal of American Folklore, 81:322 (Dec., 1968), 337-41.
8 Harp, Bealle omits all those that do not fall into the Denson line, stating that he omitted books that “conflict with the sense of linear history that the chronology is meant to describe.”14 The Cooper book is mentioned very little in his work. Near the end of his chapter on revisions in a discussion of the continuing history of the Denson and Cooper lines, Cobb describes how the James was eventually absorbed by the Denson, and then states, “Inroads have also been made into the Cooper territory. … Many of the Cooper book singers would never concede that the Denson singings are of a better quality than their own, but some of their numbers do so without hesitation.”15 There is a real need in the field for works that address the history of twentieth-century Sacred Harp singing as a multifaceted practice, treating all books and all practices as equally valid branches of the tradition. There has been a little work done on this transitional period by scholars whose ideas I have built on in my own research. Gavin James Campbell’s article “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New’: Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South” suggests ways in which Sacred Harp singing may have symbolized the old/rural culture (and gospel a new/urban one) in the minds of the singers in the late nineteenth century. The dispute over antebellum vs. gospel styles therefore parallels debates over the future of the South.16 Douglas Vinson addressed religion in his article “‘As Far From Secular, Operatic, Rag-Time, and Jig Melodies As Is Possible’: Religion and the Resurgence of interest in The Sacred Harp, 1895-1911,” focusing particularly on Joe S. James, who founded the James/Denson tunebook line, and Len Broughton, a Baptist minister who opened his church to the annual conventions of James’s United Sacred Harp Musical Association.17 Special mention must be made of Robert Vaughn’s booklet Rethinkin’ Our Thinkin’: Some Thoughts on Sacred Harp ‘Myths.’18 In it, he elucidates some of his ideas about how the various Sacred Harp tunebooks are connected, and common misconceptions held by many Sacred Harp singings about other books and the history of the practice. I was able to exchange a number of lengthy emails
14 John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: The Sacred Harp and American Folksong (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 265. 15 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978), 126. 16 Gavin James, Campbell, “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New’: Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South,” The Journal of American Folklore, 110, no. 436 (Spring 1997): 169-88. Campbell’s book Music and the Making of a New South explores more deeply the relationship between music and the New South in Atlanta from 1890 to 1925. This work, however, does not address shape note singing directly. Instead, Campbell focuses on three case studies: the annual Atlanta performances of the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddler’s convention, with particular interest in how these events impacted interactions between different genders, races and social classes. 17 Douglas Vinson, “‘As Far from Secular, Operatic, Rag-Time and Jig Melodies as is Possible’: Religion and the Resurgence of Interest in the Sacred Harp, 1895-1911.” The Journal of American Folklore 119, no. 474 (Autumn, 2006): 413- 43. 18 R. L. Vaughan, Rethinking our Thinkin’: Thoughts on Sacred Harp ‘Myths’ (Mount Enterprise, TX: Waymark Publications, 2012).
9 with him discussing my work, and he helpfully provided me with a draft copy of his forthcoming A Song As Yet Unknown, which will be similar to Makers of the Sacred Harp but focus on the Cooper Sacred Harp and its composers.19 My dissertation is of course not the first on the subject of Sacred Harp singing. That distinction belongs to Florida State University’s Charles Linwood Ellington, whose 1969 Ph.D. dissertation, The Sacred Harp Tradition of the South: Its Origin and Evolution, may be viewed as a predecessor to Cobb’s book. His penultimate chapter addresses all revisions of The Sacred Harp, from the 1850 second edition to the various different revisions published through the 1960s. Ellington’s Denson bias manifests itself curiously. He initially describes the Cooper book as another revision in the Sacred Harp canon, but then states that James’s 1909 Union Harp, a first step toward his 1911 Sacred Harp revision, was the first book to establish the practice of printing an alto part. In the very next sentence he acknowledges the presence of an alto in the 1902 Cooper book, suggesting that in Ellington’s view the Cooper book is related to, but not really a part of, Sacred Harp singing.20 A more recent master’s thesis from Florida State University, James Bagwell’s The National Sacred Harp Foundation Archives: Transcriptions of Unpublished Manuscripts and Documents, is comprised of a transcription of various twentieth-century materials held in the archives of the National Sacred Harp Foundation in Carrollton, Georgia.21 The first volume contains transcriptions of musical manuscripts by a number of major twentieth-century Sacred Harp composers in the Denson line. The second volume includes transcriptions of letters and documents related to twentieth-century Sacred Harp singing and organized by author. These documents all pertain to the Denson line and therefore most are outside the chronological prevue of this dissertation, although a few are more retrospective in nature and therefore relevant. Bagwell’s thesis additionally does not eliminate the need for further research in Carrollton, as he does not address any nineteenth-century documents in their holdings, or their fine tunebook collection. Another master’s thesis, Lisa Hardaway’s Sacred Harp Traditions in Texas (Rice University), describes both the history and current (as of 1989) state of singing there.22 Although there is not a wealth of information here, she does list a few conventions in Texas that date back to the period I
19 R. L. Vaughan, Songs Before Unknown: A Companion to The Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition, 2012, Forthcoming book, draft from February 2014, Courtesy of the author. 20 Charles Linwood Ellington, The Sacred Harp Tradition of the South: Its Origin and Evolution. Ph. D. Diss., Florida State University, 1969. 21 James Bagwell, The National Sacred Harp Foundation Archives: Transcriptions of Unpublished Manuscripts and Documents. M.M. Thesis, Florida State University, 1991. 22 Lisa Carol Hardaway, “Sacred Harp Traditions in Texas." M.M. thesis, Rice University, 1989.
10 have examined, and the history of Sacred Harp singing in Texas certainly merits further consideration beyond her work and what very little appears in my own. Because of the recent proliferation of Sacred Harp singers, there have been a few works primarily addressed to singers themselves, who are often curious about the history and culture of the practice. In A Sacred Feast: Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Ground, Kathryn Eastburn records the stories of Sacred Harp singers from across the country, punctuated with regional favorite potluck recipes.23 The book falls loosely in the category of a contemporary ethnography, but an informal one clearly intended for the general public. The Legacy of Sacred Harp is a recently published autobiographical work by Chloe Webb, a descendent of the brother of Edward Dumas, a mid- nineteenth-century Sacred Harp composer.24 Although there are details about the Dumas family that may be of use to a scholar, the book is equally about the author’s personal journey as she explored her family’s history, a quest born of her interest in her grandmother’s century-old copy of The Sacred Harp.25 Matt and Erica Hinton’s documentary Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp is also intended primarily for singers and the general public, although it is a fine introduction for any curious scholar new to the tradition.26 The documentary includes interviews with singers, scholarly narration to guide viewers through some of the details of the history, and numerous recordings made during actual sings. The historical portion of the film skips the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost entirely, and it does not mention revisions other than the Denson. In 2002, the National Sacred Harp Museum in Carrollton, Georgia, published a book that seems to be intended for both singers and scholars, although its style may discourage the casual reader. The Chattahoochee Musical Convention, 1852-2002: A Sacred Harp Historical Sourcebook, edited by Kiri Miller, is a hodgepodge of texts related to the Chattahoochee convention, the oldest continuously active Sacred Harp sing.27 After acknowledgements by John Plunkett, who coordinated the project, there is an introduction by Kiri Miller that helps prepare the reader for the information that follows. The next section contains a history of the Chattahoochee convention written by Earl
23 Kathryn Eastburn, A Sacred Feast: Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Grounds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 24 Chloe Webb, The Legacy of Sacred Harp (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2010). 25 The Legacy of the Sacred Harp also presents an interesting approach to narrative. As the book is really about her personal journey, Webb reveals her family history to the reader as she uncovered it, mostly in reverse chronological order, while at the same time describing her reactions to what she learned and other events in her family life while she was doing her research. The resulting narrative effectively moves both backward and forward in time simultaneously. 26 Matt Hinton and Erica Hinton, directors, Awake My Soul: The Story of Sacred Harp, Documentary film (Awake Productions/Digital Maps, 2006). 27 Kiri Miller, ed., The Chattahoochee Musical Convention: A Sacred Harp Historical Sourcebook (Carrollton, GA: Sacred Harp Museum, 2002).
11 Thurman for its 1952 centennial; this history primarily serves to identify as many of the singers loyal to the convention as possible and to illustrate the network of connections between them, rather like a complex family tree. The third section contains excerpts from record books and minutes of the convention from its founding through 2001. The fourth contains transcriptions of interviews and letters from singers describing their own personal connections to the convention, and the book closes with an afterword by the singer Richard DeLong, reflecting on the history of Sacred Harp singing generally and the particular role of the Chattahoochee convention. Many sections, particularly Thurman’s history, are more difficult reading than one would normally associate with a mass-market book today, but new copies are currently unavailable through conventional means and must be purchased directly from John Plunkett, suggesting that singers are the primary target audience. Another book, The Makers of the Sacred Harp by David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan also seems to be intended both for scholars and casual readers.28 The book, which explores the biographies of Sacred Harp composers, is in four parts. The first part of the book is a history of Sacred Harp singing through the Civil War and a discussion of the kinds of people who were active in singing, teaching, and composing Sacred Harp tunes. The second part, written by folklorist Richard Hulan, discusses the texts of the tunes and the poets who wrote them. The third part is a biographical encyclopedia of Sacred Harp composers in B. F. White’s original books and in the Denson tunebook line to the present day. The fourth part is an index of the most recent Denson book, listing the meter, text author, composer, and date of composition for each tune. A second index in this section lists the first published source of tunes not composed for inclusion in the Denson Sacred Harp. Although not without scholarly weight, the book is intended to serve as an accessible reference work for anyone interested in Sacred Harp composers. Both the chronological gap and strong Denson bias found in other historical works are extremely evident in this one, as well. As interest in tunebook history has grown among singers and scholars alike, there have also been reprints of the Sacred Harp and other historical tunebooks. I used my personal copy of a facsimile reprint of William Walker’s Southern Harmony in my discussion of tunebooks after the Civil War in the next chapter.29 This tunebook is used at one singing annually, held in Benton, Kentucky.
28 Warren David Steel and Richard Hulan, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 29 William Walker with Glenn C. Wilcox, ed. The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987. “Reproduced from a copy of the 1966 Pro Musicamaricana reprint, which was printed from original copies of the 1854 edition.”
12 The newest of these books is the facsimile reprint of the James Original Sacred Harp, edited by Jesse P. Karlsberg and released in February of 2015.30 There have been a number of published works that take other approaches to the study of Sacred Harp. Some ethnomusicologists are writing ethnographies about contemporary singing; Kiri Miller’s Traveling Home, discussed in the previous section, is one such contemporary ethnography. Laura Clawson’s book, I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah!: Community, Spirituality, and Tradition among Sacred Harp Singers, is similarly focused on contemporary singing culture, in this case addressing how and why communities form around Sacred Harp singing, with case studies in Sand Mountain, Holly Springs, Minneapolis, and Chicago.31 Both books are drawn from the authors’ dissertations, and Miller also published an article on the subject of oral vs. written transmission among northern Sacred Harp singers. Two other dissertations on singing in the second half of the twentieth century, Mark David Johnson’s The Sacred Harp in the Urban North: 1970-1995 (Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College)32 and Janet Lyn Herman’s Sacred Harp Singing in California: Genre, Performance and Feeling (University of California, Los Angeles),33 as well as two similar master’s theses, Brigita Sebald’s The Performance of History: Motivations for the Revivalist Participation of Sacred Harp in the Chesapeake Bay Area (The University of Maryland, College Park)34 and Jonathon Smith’s We’ll All Shout Together in that Morning: Iconicity and Sacred Harp Singing on Sand Mountain, Alabama (The University of Tennessee),35 do not seem to have produced any other printed scholarship. As I am only concerned with the period through 1936, contemporary ethnographies such as these are outside the purview of my dissertation. Some scholars have continued in Jackson’s path and analyzed the song styles and singing practices of Sacred Harp and other four-shape tunebooks. Those who have published works of this type include Charles Seeger, Dorothy D. Horn, Wallace McKenzie, Daniel Taddie, Timothy Alan
30 Joe S. James with Jesse P. Karlsberg, ed., The Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition (Atlanta and Carrollton, GA: Pitts Theology Library and The Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 2015). 31 Laura Clawson, I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah!: Community, Spirituality and Tradition Among Sacred Harp Singers (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 32 Mark David Johnson, "The "Sacred Harp" in the Urban North: 1970-1995," D.M.A. Monograph, Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, 1996. 33 Janet Lyn Herman, "Sacred Harp Singing in California: Genre, Performance, Feeling," Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997. 34 Brigita Lee Sebald, "The Performance of History: Motivations for Revivalist Participation in Sacred Harp of the Chesapeake Bay Area," M.A. Thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2005. 35 Jonathon Smith, “‘We’ll All Shout Together in That Morning’: Iconicity and Sacred Harp Singing on Sand Mountain, Alabama,” M.M. thesis, The University of Tennessee, 2009.
13 Smith, and Jimmy Ray Lazenby.36 Some of these analyses are helpful for constructing a detailed description of the characteristics of the antebellum tunebook style. Wallace McKenzie’s “The Alto Parts in the ‘True Dispersed Harmony’ of ‘The Sacred Harp’ Revisions” details stylistic differences between the only voice part that normally differs between songs shared among the various Sacred Harp tunebooks.37 Armin Hadamer’s article “O Come, Come Away: Temperance, Shape Notes, and Patriotism” traces the curious history of the pairing of the temperance text “O Come, Come Away” with the tune of the German drinking song Krambambuli in many shape-note tunebooks.38 Finally, as awareness of Sacred Harp singing has begun to expand nationally, the tradition has occasionally attracted the attention of music educators. James Scholten’s article “The Tunebook That Roars,” published in Music Educator’s Journal in 1980, is an early example.39 A few educators have written theses, dissertations or treatises on singing schools and/or shape notes as educational tools; I have included some of these in the bibliography as well. Although my work focuses on Sacred Harp singing, B. F. White’s Sacred Harp was only one of many similar nineteenth-century tunebooks. Very little has been written about the others, although there have been a few articles by Harry Eskew, Paul G. Hammond, and Daniel W. Patterson, and one dissertation by Joseph Scott (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) about other oblong tunebooks with either four or seven shapes.40 Hammond’s article is particularly
36 Charles Seeger, “Contrapuntal Style in the Three-Voice Shape-Note Hymns,” The Musical Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Oct., 1940), 483-493. Dorothy D. Horn, Sing to Me of Heaven: A Study of Folk and Early American Materials in Three Old Harp Books (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1970). Daniel Taddie, “Solmization, Scale, and Key in Nineteenth-Century Four-Shape Tunebooks: Theory and Practice,” American Music 14, no. 1 (Spring, 1996), 42-64. Timothy Alan Smith, "A Taxonomy of Pitch Formations, and an Implication-Realization Analysis of Folk-Hymn Melodies from the "Repository of Sacred Music Part Second", "Kentucky Harmony", "Missouri Harmony", "Southern Harmony", and "Sacred Harp"," D.M.A. Diss., University of Oregon, 1988. Jimmy Ray Lazenby, "The Characteristics of Sacred Harp Music: The Problem of Maintaining the Style of Music in Composition and Arrangements," M.A. Thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, 1972. 37 Wallace McKenzie, “The Alto Parts in the ‘True Dispersed Harmony’ of ‘The Sacred Harp’ Revisions,” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (1989), 153-171. 38 Armin Hadamer, “O Come, Come Away. Temperance, Shape Notes, and Patriotism,” Lied und populäre Kultur/Song and Popular Culture 45. Jahrg., (2000), 109-20. 39 James Scholten, “The Tunebook That Roars: The Sound and Style of Sacred Harp Singing,” Music Educators Journal 66, no. 6 (Feb., 1980), 32-37+74-75+77. 40 Harry Eskew, “Andrew W. Johnson's The Eclectic Harmony: A Middle Tunebook in Middle Tennessee,” Notes Second Series 58, no. 2 (Dec., 2001), 291-301. Paul G. Hammond, “Jesse B. Aikin and the Christian Minstrel,” American Music 3, no. 4 (Winter, 1985), 442-451. Daniel W. Patterson, “William Hauser's Hesperian Harp and Olive Leaf: Shape-Note Tunebooks as Emblems of Change and Progress,” The Journal of American Folklore, 101, no. 399 (Jan. - Mar., 1988), 23-36. Joseph Dennie Scott, "The Tunebooks of William Hauser ("the Hesperian Harp", "the Olive Leaf")," D.M.A. Diss., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1987.
14 relevant because he describes William Hauser’s transition from four shapes to seven, similar to that of William Walker.
Southern Gospel
Southern gospel music has been largely neglected in American music scholarship thus far, so resources are sparse. Douglas Harrison’s essay “Why Southern Gospel Music Matters” is one helpful introduction, as his purpose is to propose a new way of understanding Southern gospel that can lead to more fruitful scholarship.41 He also spends a fair amount of time addressing how the musical style, theological concerns, and social function of Southern gospel differentiate it from other styles with which it is often confused, such as black gospel or general hymnody. The two older “standard” works on gospel music contain little information on the Southern practice, as they generally try to cover too many topics under the very broad umbrella of “gospel music.” Don Cusic’s The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music includes a seven-page chapter on Southern gospel with some basic information about publishers.42 Lois S. Blackwell’s The Wings of the Dove: The Story of Gospel Music in America has a bit more information about rural Southern singing in general, although the author’s colorful writing fails to conceal a fairly scattered approach to the subject, further hampered by a strong religious bias that sometimes impairs an objective treatment of various kinds of sacred song.43 More recent scholars frequently devalue both of these works. The development of Southern gospel is addressed more completely in James R. Goff, Jr.’s Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel.44 Goff, the chief historical consultant for the Southern Gospel Music Hall of Fame and museum, traces the history of white Southern gospel music from the Yankee tunesmiths through the end of the twentieth century. Parts I and II (chapters 1 through 4) are the most relevant to this study, exploring Southern gospel’s tunebook and shape note heritage as well as listing the accomplishments of gospel publishers to the mid-twentieth century. Goff’s introduction explains exactly what the gospel music he intends to discuss is and addresses some of the reasons why it has been largely ignored by scholarship so far. Chapter 1 tells the story of tunebook singing from colonial Boston to the mid-nineteenth century, but with a particular focus on
41 Douglas Harrison, “Why Southern Gospel Music Matters,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 18, no. 1 (Winter 2008), 27-58. 42 Bob Cusic, The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990). 43 Louis D. Blackwell, The Wings of the Dove: The Story of Gospel Music in America (Norfolk, VA.: Donning, 1978). 44 James R. Goff, Jr., Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Goff also published an article titled “The Rise of Southern Gospel Music” that is drawn from his book.
15 the role of revivals and Pentecostalism. Late-nineteenth-century companies such as the Ruebush- Kieffer Company and the A. J. Showalter Company are discussed in chapter 2; twentieth-century publishers James D. Vaughan and the Stamps-Baxter Company are found in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. Douglas Harrison points to Goff’s book as the first text approaching a comprehensive history of Southern gospel, and to the collection More Than Precious Memories: The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music, edited by Michael P. Graves and David Fillingim, as the first critical work on the topic.45 Unfortunately, all the essays in the latter work focus on gospel singing as it exists today and have been of limited value for my research. Most recently, Harrison has released a book of his own, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music, which explores the cultural context of Southern gospel from the Ruebush-Kieffer company to the Gaithers.46 Stephen Shearon has been a vocal advocate for gospel music scholarship, although thus far he has not produced much published work. His 2012 entry on gospel music in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, second edition, is an excellent starting place for those who wish to explore the history of gospel.47 He also regularly gives conference presentations and leads seminars on the subject of gospel history; I was able to attend one such seminar at the 2014 meeting of the Society for American Music. His documentary I’ll Keep on Singing represents a gospel parallel to the Sacred Harp world’s tendency to produce materials intended to educate and entertain singers as well as provide an accessible scholarly introduction to the topic.48 The film is a brief introduction to Southern gospel convention singing, much as Awake My Soul introduces Sacred Harp, although it contains much less history and instead focuses on the practice as it exists in the present day, or at least within living memory. I’ll Keep on Singing does not use a narrator; instead all information comes directly from the singers themselves. Although this approach means that sometimes the information is incomplete, it also highlights how gospel convention singers perceive their musical practice as compared to other traditions, particularly four-shape tunebooks such as The Sacred Harp, regular church hymnody, and modern praise choruses.
45 Michael P. Graves and David Fillingim, eds., More than Precious Memories: The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004). 46 Douglas Harrison, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 47 Stephen Shearon, et al., "Gospel music," Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 10, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. 48 Stephen Shearon, I’ll Keep on Singing: The Southern Gospel Convention Tradition, Documentary film, Middle Tennessee State University, 2011.
16 Although there are very few resources on gospel music with a broad scope, there have been a handful of books, articles, and dissertations written on a specific person, place, or thing within the field of Southern gospel music. These scattered works by no means give a complete view of the birth of the Southern gospel industry, a subject rich with possibility for research, but they do provide some details on the people and cultures of the tradition. A handful of dissertations and articles address the careers of specific people important to the development of Southern gospel style and the Southern gospel industry. Joel F. Reed’s dissertation Anthony J. Showalter, 1858-1924: Southern Educator, Publisher, Composer (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary) addresses a major competitor and successor to the Ruebush-Kieffer company.49 Jo Lee Flemming’s dissertation James D. Vaughan, Music Publisher, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, 1912-1964 (Union Theological Seminary), is on one of the two major publishers during the early twentieth century.50 Vaughan was the first to use gospel quartets as a marketing tool and the first to use the radio to bring his music into the homes of singers and potential customers. Rebecca Lynn Folsom’s dissertation A Brief History of White Southern Gospel Music as Seen through the Career of Dwight Moody Brock (University of Missouri - Kansas City) follows the career of a composer and pianist who worked first for Vaughan and then later for his biggest competitor, the Stamps-Baxter company of Tennessee.51 Brock was the first “fifth man” added to gospel quartets, accompanying them on the piano, and he rose through the ranks of Stamps-Baxter, eventually serving as the president of the company. Written by an important early scholar of country music, Charles K. Wolfe’s article “Frank Smith, Andrew Jenkins, and Early Commercial Gospel Music” describes the careers of two men active in the gospel radio and record industries in Atlanta during the 1920s and 30s.52 All these people were active in a thriving gospel industry that continued to threaten the survival of Sacred Harp singing, fanning the flames of the conflict that produced divisions in the tradition and competing tunebooks. Other scholars choose to address the subject of gospel singing regionally. Two books have been published on gospel or sacred music generally in a specific state. William Lynwood Montell’s Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky, 1900-1990 addresses the kinds of gospel singing that would have concerned four-shape singers in the early twentieth century, although
49 Joel F. Reed, Anthony J. Showalter, 1858-1924: Southern Educator, Publisher, Composer, Thesis, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1975. 50 Jo Lee Fleming, James D. Vaughan, Music Publisher, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, 1912-1964, S.M.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1972. 51 Rebecca Lynn Folsom, "A Brief History of White Southern Gospel Music as seen through the Career of Dwight Moody Brock," DMA diss., University of Missouri - Kansas City, 1997. 52 Charles K. Wolfe, “Frank Smith, Andrew Jenkins, and Early Commercial Gospel Music,” American Music 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1983), 49-59.
17 Kentucky itself was not a major Sacred Harp singing territory and therefore lies only on the periphery of my research.53 Alabama, on the other hand, is much more directly relevant, and In the Spirit: Alabama’s Sacred Music Traditions, edited by Henry Willet, is an interesting resource for all the sacred musics under discussion.54 Each chapter of In the Spirit is a short essay by a different author on some aspect of sacred music in Alabama, many of them related to four- or seven-shape singing. The first three chapters address specifically African American traditions that are not relevant to this study. Buell E. Cobb’s chapter on the Wootens highlights one major singing family that has historically used all three Sacred Harp tunebook lines, although much of it is a general introduction to Sacred Harp singing. Henry Willett contributed a chapter on The Colored Sacred Harp, a supplemental book used by the African American “wiregrass” singers in southern Alabama, who also sing from the Cooper book. Moving toward gospel styles, Anne H. F. Kimzey’s chapter on the Deason family addresses The Christian Harmony and seven-shape singing. This chapter is the link to one by Charles Wolfe on the Athens Music Company, a northern Alabama gospel music company, as well as two short essays on contemporary gospel convention singing by Joyce Cauthen and Fred C. Fussell. Finally, Doug Seroff describes the history of gospel quartets in Alabama. The remaining chapters are on the subject of gospel bluegrass, a more recent development. Two articles document gospel conventions in southern Georgia: Karen Luke Jackson’s “The Royal Singing Convention, 1893-1931: Shape Note Singing Tradition In Irwin County, Georgia” and David H. Stanley’s “The Gospel Singing Convention in South Georgia.”55 As their titles suggest, Jackson’s article is more historically oriented, whereas Stanley’s longer one offers both historical context for and contemporary descriptions of gospel convention singing. Stanley Brobston’s dissertation A Brief History of White Southern Gospel Music and a Study of Selected Amateur Family Gospel Music Singing Groups in Rural Georgia (New York University) also covers the same area.56 Finally, Paul M. Hall’s thesis The Musical Million: A Study and Analysis of the Periodical Promoting Music Reading Through Shape-Notes in North America from 1870 to 1914 (Catholic University of America)
53 William Lynwood Montell, Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky, 1900-1990 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991). 54 Henry Willett, ed., In the Spirit: Alabama’s Sacred Music Traditions (Montgomery: Black Belt Press for the Alabama Folklife Association, 1995). 55 Karen Luke Jackson, “The Royal Singing Convention, 1893-1931: Shape Note Singing Tradition In Irwin County, Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Winter, 1972), 495-509. David H. Stanley, “The Gospel-Singing Convention in South Georgia,” The Journal of American Folklore 95, no. 375 (Jan. - Mar., 1982), 1-32. 56 Stanley Brobston, A Brief History of White Southern Gospel Music and a Study of Selected Amateur Family Gospel Music Singing Groups in Rural Georgia, Ph. D. diss., New York University, 1977.
18 addresses a particularly significant periodical published by the Ruebush-Kieffer company.57 Gospel periodicals such as The Musical Million will be essential resources for gospel music scholars as they flesh out this understudied period.
Diaspora Theory
Diaspora theory is a key concept for this study. Stéphane Dufoix’s Diasporas is probably the most helpful published introduction to the concept.58 An English translation of Dufoix’s entry on diaspora for the University Presses of France collection Que sais-je?, the slim volume offers a highly accessible introduction to the history of diaspora theory in academia, as well as the histories of some frequently discussed diaspora cultures. It also includes some of the author’s own ideas about how diasporas function in modern transnational societies. Much of the work defining the term in a way that can be applied to a variety of societies was done in the 1990s. I have already discussed William Safran’s 1991 essay on the subject, as well as James Clifford’s 1997 essay that is in part a response to Safran. Safran’s essay was published in the journal Diaspora, which was an important proving ground for scholars seeking ways to define and use the term, particularly during the 1990s. Other particularly relevant essays in Diaspora include those by Kim Butler, Dominique Schnapper, and Steven Vertovec. Butler’s “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse” attempts to define diaspora, much as Safran did, but Butler also suggests that we might view diaspora as a framework for the study of a specific kind of community formation. This is intended to help the term “diaspora” shed some of the political baggage it has accumulated through association with (and adoption by) various exploited minority communities. She suggests that the study of a diaspora might have five dimensions:
1) reasons for, and conditions of, the dispersal 2) relationship with the homeland 3) relationship with hostlands 4) interrelationships within communities of the diaspora 5) comparative studies of different diasporas59
57 Paul M. Hall, The Musical Million: A Study and Analysis of the Periodical Promoting Music Reading Through Shape-Notes in North America from 1870 to 1914. D.M.A. thesis, Catholic University of America, 1970. 58 Stéphane Dufoix, Diasporas (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008). 59 Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse” Diaspora 10:2 (Fall 2001), 195.
19 Much like Safran and Butler, Dominique Schnapper is concerned with the proliferation of the term “diaspora” in scholarship and its application to seemingly any minority or mobile culture. Rather than define the term, however, in her “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept,” she instead addresses the different factors that can encourage or discourage formation of diaspora, explores the meaning of diaspora in modern and increasingly transnational society, and finally ruminates on the validity of diaspora as scholarly term.60 Steven Vertovec’s “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’ Exemplified Among South Asian Religions” is far less focused on South Asian religions than his title might suggest.61 His focus is really on the three functions of “diaspora” that he had found most often in recent scholarship: as a social form, as a type of consciousness, and as a mode of cultural production. Only after exploring each idea in the writings of other scholars does he associate it with recent trends and events in South Asian religions practiced internationally. Outside of the journal Diaspora, scholars typically shift from interrogating what diaspora is to exploring what it does. Many studies are focused specifically on transnationalism; these studies are generally less helpful for my research than the studies discussed previously. Some, however, are particularly focused on the relationship between diaspora and identity, and these studies are most helpful for me. I have found an essay on diaspora identity among Afro-Caribbean people by Stuart Hall to be particularly interesting relative to this topic. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” explores the dual nature of cultural identity: as a shared identity that unifies a group of people, but also as a malleable identity that changes and is recreated over time.62 Hall describes diaspora in the Caribbean, where each culture is a creolization of a variety of African and European cultures, as a kind of identity formation that lives on through these cultural transformations. For Hall, it is this continuous process of identity formation and reformation in reaction to new cultures that is the hallmark of diaspora, more so than the traditional narratives of exile and return.
60 Dominique Schnapper, “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept,” Diaspora 8, no. 3 (1999), 225-253. Schnapper’s concerns lie primarily in the overuse of the term to describe all dispersed populations; she feels the term still has meaning so long as scholars restrict themselves to using it only to describe populations where there are some stable interrelations between the dispersed populations, rather than treating it as an umbrella term for all immigrant communities. Sacred Harp fits this model. Early twentieth century singers during were closely watching what appeared in each revision. Singers today may be less aware of the differences between tunebooks, but Denson and Cooper singers cooperate to disseminate information about both traditions via important resources such as the annual minute books and fasola.org. 61 Steven Vertovec, “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’ Exemplified Among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora 6, no. 3 (1997), 277-299. 62 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Jonathan Rutherford, ed. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).
20 In the introduction to Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, editors Erik Levi and Florian Schdig note that musicology has only recently come to examine displacement and other place-related phenomena in musical culture.63 When the word “diaspora” appears in an ethnomusicological study, it is sometimes used largely without interrogation to identify the subject of the study rather than in a more intentional way as part of a question to be examined. This is especially common in works on the music of the African diaspora, where the term is simply used to designate the musical traditions of the descendants of Africans who left Africa; there may be little to no reflection on the effect of diaspora on the music.64 Works where the state of diaspora itself is a key part of the research generally stress the importance of music in creating and reinforcing the diasporic identity among its members, as well as its use in mediating between the homeland and hostland cultures.65 Among ethnomusicologists, Mark Slobin has produced the best-known and most complex cultural theory that treats diaspora, and ethnomusicologists studying diasporic musical cultures frequently cite his work. In his book Subcultural Sounds, Slobin describes three different ways of describing musical cultures: superculture, suggesting an overarching category, subculture, signifying a smaller culture within the superculture, and interculture, a site for interaction between “–culture” groups.66 Diasporas serve as one of three types of intercultures; Slobin describes diasporic intercultures as primarily transnational, but acknowledges the complexities of modern diasporas, which may interact with each other or lack a single clear homeland.67
Southern History
Southern history also plays an important role in my study. There are a number of general introductory texts on the history and culture of the American South, such as such as Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland’s A History of the South and William J. Cooper, Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill’s The American South: A History.68 There are also encyclopedias whose articles and bibliographies provide a more detailed introduction to many specific topics and people. The single-
63 Erik Levi and Florian Schdig, ed., Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2010), 2. 64 See works by Charters and Winders, listed in the bibliography. 65 See works by Olsen, Ragland and Zeng, listed in the bibliography. 66 Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 12. 67 Ibid. 64. 68 Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland, A History of the South, Fourth Edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). Cooper, William J. and Thomas E. Terrill. The American South: A History, Second Edition. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).
21 volume Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Regan Wilson and William Ferris, and multi- volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Regan Wilson and James G. Thomas, Jr., are probably the most comprehensive.69 There is also an Encyclopedia of Southern History edited by David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman.70 In the preface to his 1951 book Origins of the New South 1877-1913, C. Vann Woodward suggested that earlier historians had allowed themselves to be duped by the ruling class of Southerners into thinking that there was no need for regional history in the South after Reconstruction, that the “redeemed” South was no longer fundamentally different from the rest of the nation.71 Woodward’s book showed how the South actually became more distinctive and separate, thanks to its tight political unity forged by an essentially single party system, as well as its unusual economy and social structure. Those in power were associated with the New South, which Woodward observes is not a place name or even a period, but really a rallying cry for those who were looking to build a South that in some ways was modeled on what they saw as the best elements of Northern society, particularly related to the economy and industry.72 Even sixty years after its first publication, this book is considered a standard work. Other historians returned to this period after Woodward, but the work that is generally considered to be the successor to Origins of the New South is Edward L. Ayers’s The Promise of the New South, first published in 1992. Ayers’s book has all the weight and breadth of Woodward’s, but where Origins of the New South is concerned primarily with the public realms of business and politics, The Promise of the New South digs deeper into the social hierarchy and also considers how political and economic realities impacted the lives of marginal groups, particularly poor whites, women, and African Americans. In the opening sentence of his preface, Ayers states his goal: “to understand what it meant to live in the American South in the years after Reconstruction.”73 The result is a book that is as much a cultural history as a political and economic one.
69 Charles Regan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Charles Regan Wilson and James G. Thomas, eds., The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 70 David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman, eds., The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). 71 C. Van Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). 72 The “New South” as a symbol was later explored more fully by Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking. 73 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction, 15th Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii.
22 Origins of the New South was the ninth book in a ten-book series titled A History of the South. The final book in the series, George Brown Tindall’s The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945, takes the story to mid-century.74 Woodward asserted, contrary to the popular historical interpretations at the time, that Southerners fundamentally moved away from unification with American culture from 1877 to1913; Tindall shows how the South did finally start to move back into the national mainstream, beginning with the election of Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president since the Civil War, then through facing mutual enemies in WWI, accepting federal assistance during the 1920s and especially 1930s, and finally through the nationalist fervor of WWII. As in Woodward’s book, The Emergence of the New South is richly detailed but primarily concerned with the public realm. I have not been able to find a parallel cultural study like The Promise of the New South for this period. Pete Daniel’s Standing At the Crossroads: Southern Life since 1900 takes up the same general time period as Tindall, extending the story through the early 1980s with a similar approach but with much less detail.75 A recurring theme in all these studies is the idea of a unique Southern experience that, though it may have much in common with the broad American experience, is different from it in critical ways so that it creates a shared Southern identity. A number of scholars have focused particularly on how Southern identity is defined and what makes it different from American identity. C. Van Woodward’s essay “The Search for Southern Identity,” first published in 1958, and David M. Potter’s 1961 essay “The Enigma of the South” are frequent starting places for contemporary discussions.76 The first study on the issue, however, was published in 1941 by a South Carolinian journalist, Wilbur J. Cash. The Mind of the South takes as its starting place that the South is a region that is sharply different from the rest of the nation, and although there is more diversity among its residents than many people believe, they share a unified sense of Southern-ness both with each other and with their ancestors. The book is divided into three sections, first describing antebellum Southern identity and culture, then Southern identity through the end of the nineteenth century, and finally Southern identity in the twentieth century through the 1930s. Cash’s views on Southern history are frequently not in line with interpretations generally accepted by historians today; for example, in the first chapter of his second section, “Of the Frontier the Yankee Made,” he indicates
74 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: The Louisiana State University Press, 1967). 75 Pete Daniel, Standing At the Crossroads: Southern Life since 1900. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 76 C. Van Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). David M. Potter, “The Enigma of the South,” The Yale Review 51 (October 1961), 142-151.
23 that Federal troops attacked the Confederacy to eliminate the distinctiveness of Southern culture, with a secondary aim of imposing unfair tariffs.77 It is worth noting that this represents a Southern perspective on the Civil War and its aftermath, written only a little after the period I am examining, thereby adding a second, perhaps unintended perspective for modern historians interested in the Southern mind. James C. Cobb’s Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity is the most recent study of Southern identity, and, like Cash, traces the subject from the settlement of the South through his (and our) present day. Cobb observes that identity normally refers to “a perception of reality rather than to reality itself,”78 a point made clear by the earlier example from the Cash. As the South’s relationship with the rest of the nation has shifted over time, Cobb explains how the sense of Southern identity has survived not entirely in opposition to change, but as “continuity within it.”79 This book demonstrates how complex the idea of Southern identity really is, and it is within this multifaceted idea that I place the sub-set “Sacred Harp singer.” Michael O’Brien, an English author, provides an outsider’s perspective in his The Idea of the American South: 1920-1941.80 He claims that his status as an outsider (unlike both Cash and Cobb, both Southerners) grants him objectivity, as the moral implications of various Southern identities do not affect him personally. O’Brien suggests that there are two ways to write a history of the South. One, which he characterizes as a typically American approach, is to view the South as a “social reality” which can be picked apart through positivistic research. The other, and the approach he chose, is to treat the South as an idea used by people to understand the social reality. To get at this idea, he explores how a number of individuals during the period from 1920 through 1945 viewed and used the South as a concept. Although the precise demographics of Sacred Harp singers is an area that merits further investigation, the practice is generally associated with the rural South, and therefore it is reasonable to assume that most singers were living on farms rather than in cities, and therefore primarily members of the middle or lower classes. J. Wayne Flynt’s Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites introduced the idea of studying this group, which had been overlooked in earlier studies such as those by Woodward and Tindall, which focused on the upper-class politicians and businessmen, and which had been lost in the shuffle of the rise of African American history in the ensuing
77 Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 113. 78 James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6. 79 Ibid., 7. 80 Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
24 decades.81 I. A. Newby’s Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915 offers more detail on the different kinds of lower-class white lives in the South, including sharecroppers, millworkers, and unskilled laborers, particularly via oral histories collected from those still living (in 1989) as well as their descendants.82 Finally, Steven Hahn’s The Roots of Populism explores an important political movement particularly associated with white farmers in the 1880s.83 His book is focused on the Georgia upcountry, a belt extending east to west across the state, encompassing the Appalachian foothills, which includes many important singing territories surrounding what is today the greater Atlanta area.
Religion
Textbook overviews of religion in America were usually of limited relevance for my research. Because the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw important movements such as liberal theology and social gospel in many cities, discussions of the religious history of Southern whites in such books often ends with the Protestant denominational splits preceding the Civil War. For example, Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt’s The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today only discusses changes in African American religion in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.84 One exception is Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s older but more extensive A Religious History of the American People, which devotes a chapter to late-nineteenth century Southern white churches, particularly Methodists and Baptists.85 Books on American Protestantism, such as Amanda Porterfield’s The Protestant Experience in America, have a little more information.86 The focus in these works is more typically on the urban churches, as our urban populations tend to have the ideas that shape public histories, but it is of course important to understand what was happening in the cities in order to appreciate how what was happening outside of them might have been different. Fortunately, there have been many studies on Southern religious history during this period, perhaps fueled by the interest in Southern history after the Civil War sparked by historians such as Woodward. Kenneth K. Bailey’s Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century, for example,
81 J. Wayne Flint, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). 82 I. A. Newby, Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. 83 Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 84 Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004). 85 Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). 86 Amanda Porterfield, The Protestant Experience in America (Westport: Greenwood, 2006).
25 frequently references Woodward and is written in much the same style as Origins of the New South.87 By the 1970s, most works on Southern religious history were written or edited by Samuel S. Hill, a professor emeritus of religion at the University of Florida. Among Hill’s works, I have found Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, a collection of essays that he edited, to be the most helpful.88 Within that work, David Edwin Harrell, Jr.’s “The Evolution of Plain-Folk Religion in the South, 1835-1920” is particularly enlightening for understanding the relationship between small rural congregations and denominational leadership. Hill’s own The South and the North in American Religion explores the relationship between Southern and Northern churches during the Federal period, in the years leading up to the Civil War, and at the end of the nineteenth century.89 A joint effort with four other scholars, Religion and the Solid South explores Southern religious life with an emphasis on how it is different from the rest of the nation, the dominance of evangelical Protestantism, and religion’s role in reinforcing the preservation of traditional Southern culture.90 Hill has also edited and contributed to a number of encyclopedias and more encyclopedic works, such as Religion in the Southern States, which treats each state’s religious history individually and then gives an overview of connections across the region in the final chapter, the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, and most recently, the volume on religion in the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.91 Since tunebook singing is nondenominational and generally not associated with formal worship services, it is often overlooked in histories of hymnody. Stephen A. Marini, however, is a Sacred Harp singer, and so Sacred Harp singing receives a chapter of its own in his Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture.92 Additionally, the issue of commodification figures prominently in his chapter on gospel music, and here he even touches very briefly on what I am calling the metaphoric exile of Sacred Harp singing. Another Marini article, “Hymnody as History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of American Popular Religion," examines hymn texts of the sort that are commonly found in antebellum tunebooks.93 Although his study does not cover the period I am investigating, his work provides a model for understanding the theological implications of hymn texts.
87 Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. 88 Samuel S. Hill, ed., Varieties of Southern Religious Experience (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 89 Samuel S. Hill, The South and the North in American Religion. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). 90 Samuel S. Hill, ed., Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983). 91 Samuel S. Hill, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984). 92 Stephen A. Marini, Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 93 Stephen A. Marini, “Hymnody as History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of American Popular Religion,” Church History 71, no. 2 (June 2002), 273-306.
26 There are other, more specific topics in the area of Southern religious history, such as John G. Crowley’s Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South, William H. Brackney’s A Genetic History of Baptist Thought, and the three-volume A History of American Methodism, edited by Emory Stephens Buke.94 There are also works exploring religion or religious ideas in Southern history, such as Politics and Religion in the White South, edited by Glenn Feldman, and Charles Regan Wilson’s Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South.95 Although it addresses religious life in the South before the Civil War, Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt describes the religious culture that also produced the antebellum Southern tunebooks.96
94 John G. Crowley, Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). William H. Brackney, A Genetic History of Baptist Thought (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004). Emory Stephens Buke, general ed., A History of American Methodism (New York: Abington Press, 1964). 95 Glenn Feldman, Politics and Religion in the White South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005). Charles Regan Wilson, Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2011). 96 Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: the Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1997).
27 CHAPTER 2
THE HOMELAND AND THE OTHER: SOUTHERN TUNEBOOK TRADITIONS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
The Sacred Harp and other Southern tunebooks became repositories for a variety of tune styles, representative of different times, places, and functions. As musical tastes changed during the decades immediately following the Civil War, even more tune styles were introduced, with new tunes mingling with old tunes and revised old tunes that lay somewhere in between. Since there is relatively little documentation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Sacred Harp singers, the tunes themselves become a particularly important document of their culture, and careful study of these tunes is a foundation for this study. Recognizing these styles, knowing where they came from, and understanding what they represented to singers helps us to understand which cultural ideas were appealing and which were not to each community, according to what they chose to sing. Certainly, the singers felt that one could know a thing or two about a person just by knowing which book he or she favored. This chapter provides an overview of the different styles of tunes found in the tunebooks to be considered, and explores how they interacted in two related tunebooks from the late nineteenth century, the Christian Harmony and New Sacred Harp.
Tune Styles, Old and New
All the tunes in this study can be categorized into one of two general types often described by Sacred Harp singers as “dispersed harmony” and “close harmony.” B. F. White’s nineteenth- century Sacred Harp editions, as well as a number of other four-shape antebellum books, are generally understood to represent dispersed harmony. This basic type can be considered a stylistic homeland for Sacred Harp. Unfortunately, although many authors use the term, there is little agreement as to its precise definition. Often it is defined by what it is not: “modern harmony,” or more accurately, the European tonal harmony that, in this time and place, would have been associated with advanced education and urbanity. Joe S. James seems to have been the first to use the term frequently. He described the music in his 1911 Original Sacred Harp as “…as far from secular, operatic, rag-time and jig melodies as it is possible. To this end, the music composed and compiled is in four shaped notes, and written on four staffs in dispersed harmony—some call it old harmony.”1 The term “dispersed
1 Joe S. James, The Original Sacred Harp (Atlanta, 1911, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.), iii.
28 harmony” suggests that the spacing of the voices is an important element of the style, and this seems to have been the feature most evident to James and others in the early twentieth century. In a later pamphlet detailing the faults of the competing Sacred Harp revisions, with failure to adhere to dispersed harmony as a recurring theme, James defined dispersed harmony as “…harmony which [sic] the notes forming the various chords and [sic] separated from each other by wide intervals.”2 Buell Cobb stands in the middle ground between the singers and the scholars. In his The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music, he first defined dispersed harmony as music in which “…the upper members of a chord are often dispersed rather than grouped closely,” which resembles James’ definition.3 He further adds that voice crossing is another important feature of the style, and finally points to the work of Charles Seeger and Irving Lowens for a more practical description—dispersed harmony is contrapuntal, with melodic writing for all voice parts a higher priority than most harmonic rules. There are, of course, harmonic characteristics as well. Issues of harmony and counterpoint are generally described in the works of musicologists studying antebellum tunebook hymnody, although they may not use the term dispersed harmony. Charles Seeger noted that three-voice shape-note hymns typically did not adhere to many of the familiar, European-derived rules for harmony, with features including:
1. parallel fifths, octaves and unisons 2. parallel fourths between outer voices or between upper voices without a third in the bass 3. unprepared and unresolved dissonances 4. cadences on 8/4 5. crossing of voices.4
In her book Sing to Me of Heaven, Dorothy Horn described “old harp music” as generally quartal rather than tertian. She identified the following three foundational harmonic principles:
2 Joe S. James, “An Explanation of The Sacred Harp Printed and Published by B. F. White and E. J. King in 1844,” (Pamphlet, no publisher given, Atlanta, GA, August 9, 1920, from the private collection of Robert Vaughan), 10-11. 3 Buell E. Cobb, Jr. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978), 36. Cobb cites Charles Seeger’s article that I quote from below, and Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964), 284. 4 Charles Seeger, “Contrapuntal Style in the Three-Voice Shape-Note Hymns.” The Musical Quarterly 26 (October 1940), 484-86.
29 (1) Vertical consonances are the fourth, fifth, unison, and octave. (2) Thirds and sixths are treated very much as dissonances are treated in traditional tertian harmony; they are “prepared” and “resolved.” (3) Non-harmonic tones are quite common and are used much as they are in conventional harmony.5
Although these principles accurately describe the music itself, there is the small issue that the rudiments in B. F. White’s Sacred Harp describe thirds and sixths as consonant, albeit less consonant than the perfect fourth, fifth, and octave.6 Perhaps a musically and historically accurate recombination of all these definitions is that music in dispersed harmony is contrapuntal in nature, with primarily melodic rather than harmonic drive. Ideally, all voices are melodically interesting. Unisons, octaves, fifths, fourths, thirds, and sixths are all consonant, but perfect intervals are favored, especially at cadences. Voices may be spaced in wide intervals, although voice crossings are also common. I would add that music in this style rarely adds accidentals, except for raised seventh scale degrees in some minor tunes. The use of both major and minor modes is common, as are melodies in pentatonic and other gapped scales associated with folk music. Dispersed harmony hymn tunes are often associated with particularly grim texts. The Sacred Harp and other antebellum tunebooks drew from what Stephen Marini has called “consensus hymns,” hymn texts that circulated among most evangelical Protestants during the era of the Second Great Awakening as they spoke to the generally common beliefs among them rather than specific issues of dogma that separated denominations and even individual congregations. These hymn texts primarily addressed themes of atonement, invitation, salvation and sanctification, perseverance and witness, and death and heaven.7 This roughly mirrors the experience of conversion that was common for evangelical Protestants during the late eighteenth century through about 1830, as both evangelism and tunebook singing took hold in the southern and western frontiers. New converts were often initially gripped with the guilt of sin and dread of damnation, accompanied by periods of depression sometimes so severe as to drive the sufferer to suicidal thoughts and actions. Eventually, the “saints” would overcome these powerful negative emotions through repentance and acceptance of salvation. Evangelical Christianity required constant vigilance from its members, however, with continual introspection to avoid backsliding into sin until finally the end of life came and the great
5 Dorothy Horne, Sing to Me of Heaven (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1970), 98. 6 B. F White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, 4th edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.), 13. 7 Stephen Marini, “Hymnody as History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of American Popular Religion” Church History 71 no. 2 (June 2002), 286-301.
30 reward of heaven could be claimed.8 These consensus hymns therefore spoke to every moment of the evangelical life, from the highest joy of salvation to the deepest introspective depression. There are a variety of tune types under the umbrella label of “dispersed harmony.” For the purpose of this study, I consider them within three basic types inherited from the Yankee tunesmiths: plain tunes, fuging tunes, and anthems/odes. Plain tunes are divided into two sub-types: simple plain tunes and repeating plain tunes. Simple plain tunes are strophic settings of hymn or ballad texts in standard poetic meters. They are usually short, most often consisting of a double period, and set four lines of poetry. The three or four parts move in homorhythmic, equal-voice polyphony, often called familiar style in descriptions of sixteenth-century European music. These tunes originated in the Calvinist psalmody practice of the Puritans; by the eighteenth century these were also being used to sing hymn texts by poets such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley (example 2.1).9
Example 2.1: “Yarbrough”
The Sacred Harp also includes plain tunes that set ballad texts, which tell a story. These may be Biblical or contain some moral lesson. “Villulia” is one example, and tells the story of Bartimaeus, a blind man healed by Christ. The well-known folk ballad “Wayfaring Stranger,” which was added to twentieth-century revisions, is another. I sometimes treat verse/chorus tunes in dispersed harmony as simple plain tunes, although the presence of a chorus may indicate a repeating plain tune.
8 Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 28-46. 9 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp, (Dothan, AL.: W.M. Cooper & Co., 1902, courtesy of the Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas), 243.
31 Repeating plain tunes originated during the camp revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening. They are also strophic settings of hymn texts, often the same texts as plain tunes, but add recurring phrases as refrains (example 2.2).10 The form is most often AABA or a similar pattern. Each A section contains a line of the hymn text with the refrain text at the end; the B section is usually an elaboration on the refrain. The repeated music and text allowed these tunes to be learned quickly by large crowds and enabled the leaders to expand familiar hymn texts into longer pieces.
Example 2.2: “I’m Going Home”
Fuging tunes are an elaboration on the simple plain tune. They also typically use hymn texts in standard meters and also usually set four lines of poetry. The A section sets two lines of poetry in familiar style, as in a plain tune. The B section, however, opens with fuga. After each voice part has sung the third line of poetry at least once, the third line may be repeated in familiar style, or the piece may continue directly on to the fourth line, also in familiar style (example 2.3).11 “Lenox,” which appears in this chapter, is atypical in that the text is not in a standard poetic meter and does not fit this formula, but more traditional examples appear in other chapters. More complex fuging tunes may feature multiple fugal entries. These tunes were designed as challenging showpieces for singing schools and continued to be popular in Southern conventions.
10 B. F. White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, 4th edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.), 282. 11 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 99.
32
Example 2.3: “Gospel Trumpet”
Tunes of the third type, odes and anthems, are through-composed rather than strophic like plain tunes and fuging tunes. Anthems and odes are associated with a single text, whereas the other tunes’ texts are interchangeable. Odes may set rhyming poetry, but they usually do not have verses and may be on secular subjects. Anthems are typically settings of prose and often biblical. They can be several pages long and may feature sections with contrasting textures, sometimes even changing meter. Two anthems are discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. Although they are distinct types, for the purpose of my study, the distinction between the anthem and ode is less important than their shared through-composed form and association with a single text. If dispersed harmony is the musical homeland of Sacred Harp, then the outside force that threatened to destroy it would be “close” harmony. This term is often associated with gospel music; consider James R. Goff Jr.’s book Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel. The tight harmonies of early twentieth-century gospel quartets contrast with the wide intervals of dispersed harmony. The term may be more broadly associated with seven-shape music and the musical styles it represents, all of which tend, to varying degrees, to follow the European-derived rules of tonal harmony. These tunes are clearly tertian, and although they may still feature equal-voice polyphony, they also rely on functional harmonic progressions. The close harmony tunes found in Southern tunebooks at the time either come from or are influenced by two related Northern styles: reform hymns and gospel songs. Reform hymns are identical to the simple plain tunes in form, but written in close harmony. These may be tunes
33 actually written by northern reformers such as Lowell Mason, or plain tunes from earlier four-shape books revised to close harmony (example 2.4).12 Mason was an advocate for European repertoire and musical style in the United States for much of the nineteenth century. His Bostonian upbringing, affinity for European practice, and Presbyterian sensibilities resulted in a hymnody style that used the form of the plain tunes, but with tonal harmony and a formal, emotionally restrained character. Mason published his first hymn tunes in 1822 and continued in this area for the rest of his life.13 Seven-shape books in the South initially favored these kinds of tunes, although compilers also included old favorites in dispersed harmony. Early oblong books by gospel publishers contained a combination of reform hymns and gospel song.
Example 2.4: “Missionary Hymn”
Gospel was a new sacred song style originally developed in the urban North during the mid- to-late nineteenth century. The earliest examples were written for the Sunday School movement, such as “Jesus Loves Me” by William Bradbury, who was a student of Lowell Mason. Simple,
12 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (Atlanta, 1910, courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University), 113. 13 Michael Broyles, Music of the Highest Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 62-73.
34 accessible songs with uplifting texts were found to appeal to adults as well as children, and such songs quickly became associated with the social gospel movement.14 Whereas the earlier reformers’ hymns tend to be slow and reflective, gospel songs are more upbeat and rousing, usually appealing to the emotions of the singers and listeners. These songs were designed to attract the masses in the street, in keeping with social gospel evangelist practices. After the Civil War, the popularity of gospel songs spread to the Southern states, where the style mingled with tunebook traditions to produce the earliest Southern gospel. Northern and Southern gospel songs share many characteristics: simple tonal harmonies with relatively slow harmonic rhythms, major keys, four-voice scoring, verse/chorus forms, catchy melodies reminiscent of popular songs, and positive, uplifting texts that are usually associated with only a single tune (see example 2.5).15 Since gospel songs do not require text/tune interchangeability, they are also more likely to be written in a “particular meter,” that of a text that does not fit the old metric hymn syllabic patterns. Gospel songs often emphasize lilting rhythms with either six-eight meter or dotted eighth-sixteenth patterns. Although gospel songs are strongly homophonic, as opposed to the earlier polyphonic dispersed harmony, the antiphonal textures often found in the choruses suggest the continued important role of ensemble singing. There are also standard but typically unwritten ornaments that singers might add during cadences, such as the familiar bass 5 - 3 - 1 motion at the resolution of an authentic cadence. The authors of the few studies on white gospel traditions often distinguish between the Northern and Southern gospel styles, even though differences between them are generally not musical and Southern gospel drew from the Northern repertoire. In the study of twentieth-century gospel music, the term “Southern gospel” serves to distinguish between the predominantly white style and the African American style, which emerged in the next century during the interwar years.16 The label “Southern gospel” is still important in discussion of the style’s roots, however, when there are important differences between gospel song in the two regions. There is one slight difference in the poetry: Southern gospel is more likely to use nostalgic images of nature and agrarian life. Southern gospel is also closely associated with seven-shape notational systems, whereas Northern
14 Stephen Shearon, et al. "Gospel music." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388. 15 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (Atlanta, 1910, courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University), 511. 16 Stephen Shearon, et al. "Gospel music." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224388.
35 gospel was circulated in areas that were increasingly abandoning shape notes and instead preferred European-style “roundheads.”17 These two visible differences between Northern and Southern gospel hint at the real fundamental differences between the styles, which are primarily institutional and cultural.
Example 2.5: “Emma”
Northern gospel was associated with urban Northern evangelism, which was designed to appeal to the masses of urban poor. It was modeled on popular song to appeal to urban tastes and was sung in the context of a culture that was negotiating the good and the bad of the industrial urban centers into which traditionally rural populations had been driven. Southern gospel, on the other hand, was associated with the lower classes of rural (or formerly of rural, or of formerly rural) spaces. Douglas Harrison describes how, instead of embracing modernity whole-heartedly, Southern gospel originated as a means for singers to negotiate inevitable encroaching modernity and nostalgia for the lost, agrarian past, particularly during the Reconstruction period.18 The use of seven-shape
17 Douglas Harrison, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 53, 58-9, 65. 18 Harrison, Then Sings My Soul, 53, 58-9, 65.
36 notation can be seen as an example of this balance; the four-shape system had been used throughout the South prior to the war. The seven-shape system uses the more modern, do-re-mi solmization associated with the Pestalozzian method and, in this country, the Europeanizing/modernizing musical reforms championed by Lowell Mason, but it retains the shapes for fa, sol, la, and mi from the earlier system.19 The importance of commerce and capitalism in the development of Southern gospel also cannot be ignored. Although there were songbooks printed in the north, gospel produced a major publishing industry in the South, with large companies attracting students and subscribers from across the whole region. Such capitalist empires had more in common with the urban centers of the North than the subsistence farmers to whom they appealed. If Sacred Harp singing came to be the music of an antebellum South diaspora, then the gospel singers could be musical immigrants. Gospel also uses music to express nostalgia for the lost past and retain its morals in the changing present, but it does so in a new musical language dictated by the foreign styles of the urban north.
Conflict in Context: The Christian Harmony, The Sacred Harp, and The New Sacred Harp
In the preface to his fourth edition, B. F. White’s statement on why he still believes in the four-shape system seems to be a response to some other book. This was almost certainly William Walker’s Christian Harmony, published two years earlier in 1867. White and Walker were brothers-in- law, and according to family lore, White assisted with the compilation of Walker’s Southern Harmony, first published in 1835. The two fell out, in part because Walker failed to give White any credit for his work. White then moved from South Carolina to Georgia, where he worked with E. J. King to compile the first Sacred Harp, which shares both its style and a great deal of repertoire with the Southern Harmony. 20 Given the close relationship between the two books and their compilers, as well as their fairly close geographical ranges, Walker is the most logical representative for the trend that White chose to buck. As discussed above, seven-shape notation systems tended to signify much more than solmization. William Walker’s preface to The Christian Harmony outlines some of the ways in which
19 It should also be noted that Joseph Funk was one of the handful of Southern publishers who switched to the seven- shape system prior to the Civil War, so Kieffer’s use of seven shapes likely also represents his grandfather’s influence. However, if the public had not also been receptive to the more “modern” system, then Kieffer would not have been so successful. Even among the more traditional oblong tunebooks, seven shapes also became increasingly common during this period. Seven-shape notation can therefore been seen as an example of modernity in Southern musical style, and the adoption of such a system represents an embrace of, or at least concession to, musical modernity. 20 Cobb, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its Music, 75.
37 this book is different from his previous work. Whereas the dispersed harmony tunes of The Southern Harmony were the music of the rural South, The Christian Harmony contained tunes “…used everywhere, in the cities, towns, villages and country, from the seaboard to the mountains—over the whole land, East, West, North, and South” [emphasis Walker’s].21 This book is intended as a balance of the rural past and an urban present. The gentrification of tunebook singing continues in Walker’s discussion of education. Singing schools had traditionally been taught by singing masters who may have had no training beyond their own attendance in singing schools, perhaps combined with a natural aptitude. Now, Walker advises those who wish to teach music to attend normal schools, where “thirty to one hundred pupils” might spend the whole day under the tutelage of a “Professor of Music,” with sessions lasting as long as two months. Music is now a science—the professor must be “a master of the science,” and the attendees are those “who wish to understand the science of music thoroughly.” Music is a subject of higher learning. And of course, those who attend normal schools should, according to Walker, learn the “Pestilosian” system.22 The long arm of Lowell Mason extends to the Christian Harmony. Whereas The Southern Harmony had been printed in four shapes and largely in three-part harmony, The Christian Harmony was printed in seven shapes and with four voices throughout. Walker makes no comment on the addition of the extra voice part, but four-part harmony is standard for Northern reform hymns. The shapes are Walker’s own; at the time, many publishers believed that seven-shape systems were copyrighted and therefore devised their own shapes for do, re, and si.23 The book is heavily dominated by plain tunes, a reflection of the emphasis on church music. These tunes include some from the Southern Harmony as well as many drawn from other books, and some were newly composed. The tunes retained from the Southern Harmony are all printed in four parts, which in most cases required the addition of an alto voice. In many cases, however, Walker preserved the other three voice parts and printed tunes that were still more or less in dispersed harmony. For example, “Ninety-Third” (example 2.6 and 2.7) has an alto and one added grace note in the tenor but is
21 William Walker, The Christian Harmony, (Philadelphia: published by E. W. Miller and William Walker, 1867, from the private collection of Jonathon Smith), vii. 22 Ibid. 23 As I cannot reproduce the Walker shapes, I have chosen to not transcribe them to preserve the original appearance.
38 otherwise identical to the version in the Southern Harmony.24 Although the alto fills some thirds into what had been open fifths, including the cadences at the end of the first phrase (m. 4) and third phrase (m. 11), the open fifths at the beginning and end of the first period (m. 1 and 7) are preserved. The alto does add a fifth in the final chord, which had been in octaves, but this harmony is not out of line for dispersed harmony.
Example 2.6: “Ninety-Third Psalm,” The Southern Harmony
Example 2.7: “Ninety-Third,” The Christian Harmony
Repeating plain tunes are much less common, but the scarcity of fuging tunes is particularly striking. Of the handful that are included, most appear with optional music to fill in the fugal entries, turning them into plain tunes. “Lenox” (example 2.8 and 2.9) was already a four-voice tune in The
24 William Walker, with Glenn C. Wilcox, editor, The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987; “reproduced from a copy of the 1966 Pro Musicamaricana reprint, which was printed from original copies of the 1854 edition”), 7. William Walker, The Christian Harmony (Philadelphia: E. W. Miller and William Walker, 1867; courtesy of the private collection of Jonathon Smith), 128.
39 Southern Harmony, so the alto is not new.25 All the notes from the original tune are still present. Walker added a few “choosing” notes, sparing the basses some high pitches and offering the altos the option to sing the fifth in the final chord, rather than filling in the third. Optional notes, indicated by small round heads, are added to the treble and alto parts so that they can enter with the tenor, and when sung with these optional notes, the initial bass entrance is to be omitted. A few more of these optional notes are added to sustained pitches in the treble and bass near the end so that the tune can be homorhythmic throughout. White presented his subscribers with options so that they may decide how city or how country they want to be. As one might suspect based on the reference to the Pestalozzian method in the preface, Lowell Mason plays a major role in the repertoire of the tunebook. This introduction of Northern ideas appears to have come to Walker via William Hauser, whose Hesperian Harp is also very heavily influenced by the reform hymnody. A number of tunes by Hauser and his son are included, and they are both acknowledged in the preface.
Example 2.8: “Lenox,” The Southern Harmony
25 Walker, The Southern Harmony, 77. Walker, The Christian Harmony, 293.
40
Example 2.9: “Lenox,” The Christian Harmony
There are many examples of reform hymns in the Christian Harmony, such as Mason’s “Lynn,” a typical plain tune from a Northern reformer (example 2.10).26 Following the style of the traditional plain tune formula, this tune comprises four phrases to make a double period. The text is in a standard poetic meter, in this case, long meter, with four lines per stanza. Tertian harmony dominates, and the second phrase is filled with chromatic secondary dominants. This is especially common in Mason’s hymns, which often feature some form of harmonic departure in the second phrase. Unlike the more traditional texts used in dispersed harmony, which often emphasize the rewards of heaven and the pains of hell in more or less equal measure, Mason has selected a placid text about the peace of faith. Indeed, each stanza begins with “Asleep in Jesus!” The meter, 3/2, suggests a slow tempo, and the expression marking is “gentle and calm.” Although “Ninety-third” shares the same meter and also features an overall uplifting text, the non-tertian cadences would likely have been seen as harmonic errors, and there are far more quarter and eighth notes to propel the tune rhythmically.
26 Walker, The Christian Harmony, 172.
41
Example 2.10: “Lynn”
Some of Mason’s hymn tunes are settings of melodies drawn from European art music; his “Antioch” (Joy to the World) is likely the best-known example. Walker included about ten transcriptions of tunes by European composers, including Handel and Haydn as well as other well- known composers from Austria, Germany, and England. A note below a Mason setting of an unnamed Gluck melody indicates that Mason called this tune “a beautiful specimen of maturity of judgment, cultivation of taste, and simplicity and elegance of diction.”27 Not all of the settings of European melodies are by Mason; most list only the composer of the original melody. “Bartholday,” (see example 2.11, p. 43) which is drawn from Felix Mendelssohn’s Lied ohne Worte op. 38 no. 6, “Duetto” (see example 2.12, p. 43), is one such tune arranged by an anonymous composer.28 The melody first stated in mm. 6-9 of Mendelssohn’s original piece is used as the basis for each of the two periods in the hymn tune, the first ending with a half cadence and the second with an authentic cadence. Arranging instrumental music into plain tunes does require some heavy editing; one noted Mendelssohn scholar opined that “Mendelssohn would surely have run screaming into the night if he had heard the pedestrian way that they arranged his melody to get the first half to end on the dominant.”29 Although later editions would come to include many gospel songs, the first edition of The Christian Harmony predates all the major Southern gospel publishing houses, limiting the number of sources from which such music could have been drawn. There are a few examples in this early
27 Walker, The Christian Harmony, 80. 28 Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Lied ohne Worte op. 38, from Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdys Werke, Serie 11 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, n.d., reprinted Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1968), (39)15. Walker, The Christian Harmony, 181. 29 Douglass Seaton, personal communication, spring 2011.
42 edition, however, such as R. M. McCoy’s “We’ve a Mansion in Heaven” (example 2.13).30 McCoy was a Southern composer of Sunday school and gospel songs. Although he had no training in the North himself, he studied under L. C. and Asa B. Everett, who had studied in Boston.31 This song’s jaunty rhythms are a striking contrast to the starker plain tunes.
Example 2.11: “Bartholday”
Example 2.12: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Lied ohne Worte op. 38 no. 6, mm. 6-11
30 Walker, The Christian Harmony, 348. 31 Harry Eskew, "McIntosh, Rigdon McCoy," Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 2, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/1735.
43
Example 2.13: “We’ve a Mansion in Heaven”
Lowell Mason is largely credited with encouraging the use of seven-syllable solmization in this country, replacing the four-syllable system that had been in use since the early days of the English colonies. Seven-shape notation was developed by a Midwestern tunebook compiler, Jesse Aikin, who wished to introduce seven-syllable solmization to the shape-note-singing audience. In the South, the adoption of these Northern developments in music pedagogy also came with Northern styles, as seen in The Christian Harmony. These changes almost all occur during and after Reconstruction, however, even though Aikin’s tunebook, The Christian Minstrel, was first published not long after the first edition of The Sacred Harp. The Civil War may have fostered musical exchanges, as soldiers did sometimes hear each other’s music before and after battles, and hymn singing would be a logical diversion for POWs. Still, there are other forces at work. The Christian Harmony preface clearly demonstrates a desire for Northern-style urbanity and sophistication, while including the best of the rural Southern musical heritage. This tunebook is the New South ideal realized in musical form. In his fourth edition, B. F. White only explicitly rejected the North’s notation and solmization systems; he says nothing of the new styles or addition of alto voices. By not overhauling
44 his book or releasing a new one, however, he implicitly rejects all these changes. The fourth edition of the Sacred Harp is still a four-shape tunebook for primarily three voices, unconcerned with the styles of the city churches, and the adherence to this style became the defining feature of Sacred Harp singing as the nineteenth century drew to a close. There are some hints, though, that although White was not interested in dramatic changes, he was also not totally opposed to every element of the new style. Fifty tunes were cut and over 120 were added to the fourth edition. This kind of curation is normal for White’s revisions, and the addition of new repertoire while removing tunes sung less often helped to keep the book fresh. The ratio of tunes in three vs. four parts among these new tunes is roughly the same as that in the book overall, but this may not be immediately obvious when one glances through the book. Most of the new tunes replacing those that were cut are in three voices. As a result, the new appendix, which showcases new music, contains a much higher ratio of four-voice tunes. Perhaps White was advertising his interest in one of the relatively new ideas found in the Christian Harmony: the alto part. As he says nothing explicit about three vs. four-part harmony, we must guess why this particular idea was appealing. Very little work has been done on the history of the alto part in Sacred Harp, which will be explored in Chapter 4. Walker also included a number of reform hymns among his new tunes, but they usually appear with harmonic alterations, a process George Pullen Jackson called “Southernization.” Still, they may sound a bit more like close harmony than dispersed. One example, “Boylston,” will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6. B. F. White died in 1879, and there were no new editions until the twentieth-century revisions were published. The popularity of Sacred Harp singing faded somewhat during this time, revived again in the next century with the new revisions. Still, White’s book did continue to be used by many singers, enough to merit at least two reprintings, one as late as 1897.32 It is difficult to say why these singers continued to use the old Sacred Harp, but copies were widespread. J. L White is the publisher of the 1897 book, but he must have been working with several publishing houses. Some of those listed are in Southern cities such as Savannah and Mobile, but others also appeared in more distant cities such as Baltimore, Louisville, Arkansas, and St. Louis. It is unclear why White would have worked with so many publishers, but perhaps their geographic spread indicates that the book had some use outside of the traditional Georgia/Alabama/Texas area and into the Midwest.33
32 R. L. Vaughan, Rethinking our Thinkin’: Thoughts on Sacred Harp ‘Myths’ (Mount Enterprise, TX: Waymark Publications, 2012), 24. 33 B. F White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, 4th edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.), front cover and title page.
45 Although no one was revising the old book, clearly there were still individuals who were caretakers for B. F. White’s legacy. White never worked in isolation, and there were others who could have logically followed him as the lead editor for the book. At least three of White’s four sons were singers and teachers in their own right, and so it would seem natural that one or more of them might take up his father’s mantle.34 It seems that two may have tried in the 1880s but produced a book that is radically different from their father’s. In 1884 White’s two youngest sons, B. F. White, Jr., and J. L. White, released The New Sacred Harp, a seven-shape, four-voice tunebook. The intended function of the tunebook is not entirely clear. The New Sacred Harp is a relatively small tunebook, with fewer than 200 pages and a little more than 200 tunes. The title page says that the book’s “hymn-tunes, anthems, and popular songs” are suited for “the Choir, Class, Convention, and Home Circle.”35 The preface, however, says that the book was “…compiled to meet the demands of the Singing-School, and also to furnish suitable music for Church Use.” It also indicates that the “Old Sacred Harp” would still be printed and in the original four-shape system, which suggests that this book was not intended to be its replacement. There is also much less stylistic diversity in this book; it contains only simple plain tunes, gospel songs, and a few anthems, with close harmony in use throughout. Although it may be stylistically limited internally, this book would effectively add diversity if used as a supplement to the fourth edition of the Sacred Harp. The book was probably only meant to be used in isolation in the two settings mentioned in the preface: singing schools and church services. The reform hymns were likely the kinds of music that the urban churches wanted, and the gospel songs, with their popular song idioms, may have had more youth appeal. The simple plain tunes found in The New Sacred Harp represent a variety of sources, with tunes from the old Sacred Harp, tunes from Northern reformers, and tunes from other seven-shape tunebooks, such as the Christian Harmony as well as the early publications of some gospel firms, which contained both plain tunes in the reform style as well as gospel songs. There are almost thirty tunes retained from the old Sacred Harp, usually with some modification. All three-part tunes have an added alto; in one case, a second treble part is removed and replaced with an alto. The treble part is frequently revised, and sometimes the bass, too, in order to transform the tune from dispersed to close harmony. “Mear” appears in The Sacred Harp as a three-voice simple plain tune (example
34 David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 22. 35 B. F. White [Jr.] and J. L. White, The New Sacred Harp (No publisher given, 1884, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.), title page.
46 2.14).36 In The New Sacred Harp, it has an alto, plus a revised treble and a gently revised tenor (example 2.15). The harmonic progression is largely unchanged, with the notable exception of the secondary dominant introduced in the second phase, but the alto and revised treble are used to add thirds to the frequent open fifths of the older version. The meter has also been changed from 3/2 to 3/4, suggesting a faster, “moderato” tempo, and the first measure has been reduced to an anacrusis. The bleak text of the original, a disturbing if hypothetical question, is replaced by cheerful words of praise.37
Example 2.14: “Mear,” The Sacred Harp
Example 2.15: “Mear,” The New Sacred Harp
Not all the simple plain tunes from the old Sacred Harp were originally simple plain tunes. “Newman” appears in B. F. White’s Sacred Harp as a repeating plain tune (example 2.16),38 but in the New Sacred Harp the text has been shuffled so that the tune may be sung without the repeat. This
36 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 4th edition, 49. 37 White and White, The New Sacred Harp, 48. 38 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 368.
47 new version does still have repeats around the first period, but there is no text indicated for the repeat. As in “Mear,” the harmonies have been altered to “Northernize” the tune (example 2.17).39
Example 2.16: “Newman,” The Sacred Harp
Example 2.17: “Newman,” The New Sacred Harp
As in The Christian Harmony, most of the fuging tunes that appear in the New Sacred Harp have been “de-fuged,” but in this book the changes are not optional. The New Sacred Harp contains an adaptation of the Sacred Harp version of “Lenox” (see example 2.18 p. 49).40 In this adaptation, the entire B section has been filled in with no option to sing the tune as a fuging tune. The text has also been changed.41 These revised older tunes are surrounded by many more that were originally written in close harmony. Many have Northern origins, but a number of them are also from early Southern gospel publishers such as Aldine S. Kieffer or A. J. Showalter. “Howe” (see example 2.19) demonstrates
39 White and White, The New Sacred Harp, 46. 40 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 40. 41 White and White, The New Sacred Harp, 96.
48 that these tunes may be slightly less stoic than the northern tunes, tinged with a gospel song sensibility through the use of more lively rhythms.42
Example 2.18: “Lenox,” The New Sacred Harp
Although there is no formal sectional division between them, the plain tunes increasingly give way to gospel song in the book’s final pages. Showalter again is well represented, but so is a lesser-known composer, John McPherson, who worked for a number of gospel firms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.43 His “Oh, How Glad!” (see example 2.20) has many hallmarks of gospel song; the verses and chorus feature images such as angels and light as well as emotions such as joy and bliss in a setting with simple, slow, tertian, tonal harmonies anchored by a mostly static bass and lilting dotted rhythms.44
42 White and White, The New Sacred Harp, 47. 43 McPherson is not discussed in any of the literature on the history of gospel music, but a Worldcat search with author “John McPherson,” keyword “hymn,” and the date range of 1850 to 1920 turns up sixteen sacred songbooks from a variety of publishers across the South and Midwest with McPherson as a co-author. 44 White and White, The New Sacred Harp, 106.
49
Example 2.19: “Howe”
Example 2.20: “Oh, How Glad!”
In a clear demonstration of Southern gospel’s tunebook roots, a number of the gospel songs actually use metric hymn texts common in older books as their verses, with new text material in the chorus. Showalter’s “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks,” is one example, but the most extreme is certainly the version of “Oh, How I Love Jesus” (example 2.21), a widely known but anonymous Northern gospel song. Although the chorus text is preserved, the verses set “Alas! And did my Savior bleed.”
50 This text, particularly the second verse, flies in the face of the cheerful, pleasant, upbeat, non-bloody personal testimony of faith at the core of gospel poetry conventions.45
Example 2.21: “Oh, How I Love Jesus!”
It is unclear how well the book was received, but since there were no other editions, it stands to reason that it was not wildly successful. Sacred Harp singers must not have been interested in this supplement, either because they did not want to sing seven-shape, modernized urban tunes and hymns or because they were content to use other available tunebooks as a source for such music. The Whites would have been facing stiff competition in this area by the 1880s, as the Kieffer- Ruebush company was well established; their periodical The Musical Million began circulation in 1870, their Virginia Normal Music School was founded in 1874, and the first edition of their most popular tunebook, The Temple Star, was released in 1877.46 The odd hybrids found in the Christian Harmony and New Sacred Harp, such as the de-fuging of “Lenox” and the jarring juxtaposition of “Alas! and did my Savior bleed/Oh, how I love Jesus,” represent how Southern tunebook styles were evolving during the Reconstruction and beyond and show that the audience for the older books, for the most
45 White and White, The New Sacred Harp, 102. 46 Douglas Harrison, Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 51-2.
51 part, became the audience for the new. Still, something about the Sacred Harp remained important to a minority of singers, as it became the primary source for antebellum tune styles. Even though the practice of singing Sacred Harp may have been a family tradition passed down from the previous generation, and in that sense may have behaved in a more “routine” fashion, the continued use of the Sacred Harp indicates a hint of retrospection in the musical habits of these singers. The musical diaspora was starting to form.
52 CHAPTER 3
THE COOPER SACRED HARP: THE FIRST TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVISION
The first new Sacred Harp edition published after B. F. White’s death did not come from anyone in White’s family, inner circle, or singing community. Instead it was published by Wilson Marion Cooper, a singing teacher in southern Alabama with no known connection to the White family. Although the singers in the book’s original home territory in Georgia balked at this “interloper” and his work, the Cooper Sacred Harp established new ideas and spurred others to publish their own revisions. Each of these compilers now had to respond to Cooper, and in this sense the Cooper book helped to shape all other twentieth-century Sacred Harp revisions. There is no evidence that Cooper had any connection to or ever met anyone in the White family, but there is also no evidence to disprove any such connections. We do not know when and where Cooper learned to sing Sacred Harp or who his teachers were, only that census documents show he lived in the southeast Alabama area until the last few years of his life. There are, however, possible connections between B. F. White and south Alabama.1 Settlers followed the frontier west across the South throughout the nineteenth century, and many singers, composers, and teachers settled and died west of their birthplaces. B. F. White’s son D. P. White married a woman in Alabama and lived in Henry County, just north of Dothan, before later moving further west to Texas.2 So although Cooper was unknown to the singers in the Atlanta area, he may still have had the pedigree of a White family student. Cooper’s book was embraced in some circles but criticized by others as outside of the acceptable Sacred Harp practice. His outsider status likely played a part in their objections; singers in northern Alabama and Georgia who had been raised in the White family’s immediate sphere of influence and considered themselves to be the stewards of Sacred Harp singing were probably shocked to see “their” book hijacked by an outsider. Joe James, a particularly vocal critic of Sacred Harp revisions other than his own, regarded the Cooper book as too modern because of allegedly inappropriate harmonic changes to traditional tunes and the introduction of gospel tunes.3 These changes reflect Cooper’s relatively “routine” approach to Sacred Harp singing.
1 R. L. Vaughn, Rethinkin’ our Thinkin’: Thoughts on Sacred Harp “Myths” (Mount Enterprise, TX: Waymark Publications, 2012), 10-12. 2 David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 167. 3 James’ criticism of other books will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
53 Even if the legitimacy of this book was questioned, its influence is undeniable. Cooper changed the Sacred Harp from a collection of primarily three-part tunes to exclusively four-part tunes, a feature adopted by nearly all the revisions that followed. He would later sue Joe S. James for using many alto lines from the Cooper book in his own revision without credit. The work of this “interloper” likely also spurred action on the production of other revisions, released by other compilers in an effort to claim status as the true heir to B. F. White’s legacy. It was these disagreements that ultimately led to the dispersal of the Sacred Harp diaspora. W. M. Cooper was born in 1850 in Haw Ridge, a small farming community in southern Alabama.4 All trace of the settlement has disappeared and the precise location is no longer known, but it is generally agreed to be somewhere near or on the border of Coffee and Dale counties.5 Cooper married Mary S. Hayes sometime around 1876,6 and they had three children: Anna Cooper, who would play an important role in the Sacred Harp revisions as well as in her father’s life during his later years, and two sons, George, a doctor,7 and Amana, who died in 1911 at the age of 25.8 Census information shows that Cooper was a farmer and sometimes schoolteacher9 through the end of the nineteenth century. The 1900 census lists him as a farmer living in Haw Ridge with his wife, youngest son, and a hired African American farmhand.10 Mary Cooper died in 1901 of unknown causes,11 and around this time Cooper left his farm and moved to the growing city of Dothan with his daughter and son-in-law, Randall David Blackshear.12 Dothan was becoming an increasingly important rail hub, and the population had been expanding exponentially since the end of Reconstruction.13 R. D. was a doctor and worked in a
4 "United States Census, 1880," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/M4JC-C9M : accessed 08 Feb 2014), Wilson M. Cooper, Haw Ridge, Coffee, Alabama, United States; citing sheet 305A, family 0, NARA microfilm publication T9-0008. 5 Fred Shelton Watson, Coffee Grounds, A History of Coffee County, Alabama, quoted at “RootsWeb ALDALE-L History of Haw Ridge Community; on border between Dale and Coffee Counties, AL” [http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/ALDALE/2000-10/0971814380] 6 R. L. Vaughn, Songs Before Unknown: A Companion to The Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition, 2012 (forthcoming book, draft from February 2014, courtesy of the author). 7 Advertisement, Dothan Home Journal, Volume 7 no. 48, March 14, 1906, p. 9. 8 “Cooper Family Tree” Ancestry.com [http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/26254881/family?fpid=1808776185] 9 "United States Census, 1880," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/M4JC-C9M : accessed 08 Feb 2014), Wilson M. Cooper, Haw Ridge, Coffee, Alabama, United States; citing sheet 305A, family 0, NARA microfilm publication T9-0008. 10 "United States Census, 1900," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/M987-BVR : accessed 09 Feb 2014), W M Cooper, Precincts 12-13 Centerville, Haw Ridge, Coffee, Alabama, United States; citing sheet , family 101, NARA microfilm publication T623, FHL microfilm 1240009. 11 Personal correspondence with Robert Vaughn, February 24, 2014. 12 Robert Vaughn, Songs Before Unknown. 13 Fred S. Watson, Hub of the Wiregrass: A history of Houston County, Alabama, 1903-1972 (Anniston, Alabama: Higginbotham, Inc., 1972), 226.
54 number of Dothan practices during the next ten years, sometimes partnering with his brother or with his brother-in-law, George.14 Cooper may have sold his farm to help his son-in-law start his practice. Cooper must have also begun working on his Sacred Harp revision around this time; the preface to the first edition is dated December 1902, and newspaper records indicate that it was available for purchase in May of 1903.15
The 1902 Cooper Sacred Harp
The Cooper book demonstrates a certain tension between the old and the new. In the case of the Cooper Sacred Harp, the diaspora longing is evident in the use of the title The Sacred Harp as well as traditional styles and repertoire and some of the comments in the front matter, but at the same time it does include many new features that could suggest a degree of assimilation. Studies of tunebook revisions naturally tend to focus on what has changed. It is important, though, not only to examine what has changed but also to remember what has remained the same. For all their differences, the Sacred Harp revisions are all deeply rooted in the “homeland” of the nineteenth- century books of B. F. White. All of these communities clearly valued the antebellum practices and repertoire; the singers rejected those revisions that diverge too far and cross certain lines. Like other editors, including B. F. White in his later editions, Cooper worked with a twelve- man revision committee, consisting of himself, B. P. Poyner, W. R. McCoy, T. W. Loftin, D. F. Stevens, J. M. C. Shaw, W. L. McGee, W. A. Robinett, W. I. Thompson, J. F. Helms, J. C. Ross, and S. C. D. Brown, the secretary.16 These men were likely other composers, teachers, and leaders in the south Alabama region. Most of them also contributed at least one tune to the revision as a composer or arranger. Examination of the front matter shows repeatedly that Cooper and his revision committee sought to preserve the older work while also updating it to suit the needs of a new generation of singers. Cooper was up front about the fact that his book was a revised version of The Sacred Harp; the full title of the first edition is The Sacred Harp: Revised and Improved. The title page includes a further explanation:
14 Dothan Home Journal, v. 3 no. 16, July 17, 1901, p 5 Dothan Home Journal, v. 4 no. 49, January 27, 1903, p. 6 Dothan Home Journal, Volume 7 no. 48, March 14, 1906, p 9 Dothan Home Journal v. 12 n.44 October 27, 1909, p. 10. 15 Dothan Home Journal, v. 4 no. 50, February 3, 1903 p. 4 Dothan Home Journal, v. 5 no. 9, May 26, 1903 16 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp (Dothan, AL.: W.M. Cooper & Co., 1902, courtesy of the Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas), 8.
55 The selections are from the old SACRED HARP, remodeled and revised, together with new additions from the most eminent authors, including new music by the author and reviser.17
Cooper did not call his book a fifth edition. It may be that he saw it as simply a book, and not a part of a grand tradition; the idea of The Sacred Harp as a symbol was less important to him. Cooper likely kept the title The Sacred Harp because B. F. White’s book was clearly the basis for his own. The title also may have also helped to move copies. By this time, Sacred Harp singing was probably the only form of four-shape singing practiced in the area, and the book is still primarily in the older antebellum style. Continuing to use the name The Sacred Harp would let potential buyers know that it was not a seven-shape book and give them some sense of its contents before they even opened the cover. The revision committee’s six recommendations also show a mixture of conservative and progressive attitudes, although only one is truly revolutionary.
First. That the four-shaped notes be retained. Second. That all the church songs be retained. Third. That alto be added to all songs without alto. Fourth. That more poetry be added to some of the songs. Fifth. That a great many of the keys which are too high be adjusted. Sixth. That old songs which are not now used be rejected, and new ones inserted in their place.18
The first two recommendations are about not changing two elements of the book: the notational system, which again made The Sacred Harp unique by the twentieth century, and the church songs. This primarily refers to the tunes in the first section of the book, which B. F. White labeled as “used by worshiping assemblies.”19 This section is overwhelmingly composed of simple plain tunes, many from earlier Northern composers who likely had Calvinist psalmody and hymnody in mind. The desire to retain these tunes indicates that they were particularly useful, and suggests that The Sacred Harp was functioning as a hymnal in some churches. The fourth resolution, adding verses to some tunes, also suggests church use.
17 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 7. 18 Cooper, The Sacred Harp, 8. 19 B. F. White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, 4th edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 27.
56 The fourth and fifth recommendations are relatively minor revisions. Adding verses is not generally destructive, particularly since the poetic texts set in these tunes usually have far more verses than are printed in The Sacred Harp. In this sense, the added material may be considered a part of the original work. The addition of verses can be problematic in tunes where the B section is repeated during the final verse because singers may not find the rhetorical emphasis of the new final verse to be as meaningful. Still, singers can easily manage the problem by reordering or omitting verses. The need to transpose tunes is a tantalizing bit of evidence that in the early twentieth century Sacred Harp singers were sometimes singing to a fixed pitch, unlike the modern practice of intuitively keying tunes to suit the voices of those assembled. Perhaps leaders during this time used tuning forks or pitch pipes to set the tunes in the given key. Instrumental accompaniment is still rather unlikely; the four-staff format is tricky for a keyboard player to read, and some of the new keys would prove challenging for an instrumentalist. For example, transposing “Restoration” from F major to D-flat major might help the singers, but any instrumentalists involved would probably rather use the old key, or D major, or C major. The remaining third and sixth recommendations are the two that resulted in major changes to the book. To remove tunes might seem disruptive, but removing tunes that are not being sung and replacing them with new ones is an established part of a Sacred Harp revision. B. F. White’s fourth edition replaced almost fifty of the tunes from the third edition. Although other Sacred Harp singers might object to the style of some of the tunes that Cooper added, the practice itself is normal for a new edition. The third recommendation, the addition of an alto line to all tunes, is the only one that is truly radical. Still, much like the added verses, if a particular singing community did not approve of the new alto lines, they could simply not sing them. Cooper attributed each new alto line to its author, so it is very easy to tell which tunes had been originally written for three voices. This is true both of the older tunes from the previous Sacred Harp as well as new tunes that were also originally composed in three parts. Although it is not mentioned in the front matter, there was one other significant change in the Cooper edition. Many of the titles were changed. Traditionally, titles referred to the tune only, since the texts were interchangeable. Tune titles in B. F. White’s Sacred Harp may therefore have nothing to do with the text. For example, “Amazing Grace” appeared under the actual tune title, “New Britain,” and a ballad on the healing of the beggar Bartimaeus was titled “Villulia.” In Cooper’s book, they are “Amazing Grace” and “Mercy, O Thou Son of David”; each was renamed
57 with the opening of the text printed with the tune. Although it may have been confusing for some older singers, this approach was likely designed to make the book more accessible to new singers. W. M. Cooper’s preface contains still more details. From the very beginning, it is clear that his book comes from a place of love for The Sacred Harp, but was inspired by a consensus that the book needed an update.
For more than fifty years the SACRED HARP has been justly regarded as a veritable treasury of song, and its grand old melodies have been sung over and over so many times by the generations who loved them, that the book itself has come to seem almost like a sacred thing. One would hesitate, therefore, before attempting to alter such a book or add to or take from its pages. But during the past few years a conviction has grown up in the minds of SACRED HARP singers that certain changes and additions were necessary to make the book conform to the requirements of the present day.20
Here the reader learns that, in addition to the previously discussed changes, Cooper also corrected some “errors of harmony” that he believed to be typos and re-wrote the rudiments of music section, updating the terms used and eliminating sections that he felt were unnecessary. When discussing the addition of new tunes, he draws particular attention to his new anthem on the Crucifixion. As the previous Sacred Harp had anthems on the subjects of Christmas and Easter, this addition filled a crucial theological gap in the anthem section. Although he addresses the introduction of new tunes, Cooper does not say anything about the addition of new styles. It is also here that we learn why Cooper added all the new alto parts:
To… the additions already mentioned, an addition of still greater importance was thought desirable; many singers wanted the alto written for each song. This work was undertaken by the author, and while involving more thought and labor than all the other changes combined, it has been done to the best of his ability.
Actually, Cooper wrote a little fewer than half the new alto parts, but each is credited to the proper author in the body of the book. He likely did edit the others. With more than 300 tunes in need of altos, this was a massive undertaking. Karen Willard and Stanley Smith, two prominent Cooper book singers and editors of the twenty-first century, have suggested that Cooper used alto-writing as an exercise in his singing schools for a time. This gave his students practice with composition, and
20 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1909), 9.
58 Cooper added particularly excellent student work to his revision.21 He clearly agreed with the singers asking for the new part that the book really did need this fourth voice. The addition of the alto line may suggest a change in the demographics of Sacred Harp conventions; the history of the alto in Sacred Harp singing will be discussed in much more detail in the next chapter. In addition to this combination of conservatism and progressivism with respect to the Sacred Harp, there are more subtle cues suggesting two contrasting attitudes towards nostalgia, both of which are likely to have been active, but perhaps to different degrees, during the process of any Sacred Harp revision. Consider the two shades of meaning associated with the word “old” in all the quoted text. In Cooper’s preface, “old” is initially associated with reverence, “…its grand old melodies have been sung over and over so many times by the generations who loved them…” This is the kind of nostalgic language that is often associated with Sacred Harp singing today, particularly in the way The Sacred Harp is viewed as a connection between generations, even after death. It also reflects the more nostalgic “retrospective” approach that underlies the Sacred Harp diaspora, even among singers whose practice is more “routine” on the surface. Cooper goes so far as to call the book “almost sacred” because of this history of reverence. The operative word, though, is “almost.” The revision committee’s final recommendation, “That old songs which are not now used be rejected, and new ones inserted in their place,” demonstrates that “old” is only valuable if it is still useful. So age alone was not enough for something to have had value to Cooper and his committee, and those things which had less meaning were fair game to be replaced, a reflection of their “routine” practice. Cooper’s first Sacred Harp edition added almost eighty new tunes. Many composers have more than one contribution or served on Cooper’s revision committee, suggesting that, rather than pilfering heavily from other books, most of the new tunes seem to be written by people that Cooper knew and perhaps even taught in singing schools during the previous century. The number of composers indicates that Cooper’s circle was vibrant and creative. Several tunes are four-part settings of existing tunes, often “as sung by” some person who was an important figure in the author’s life or community, adding touches that made the book just a bit more special to the singers in southeastern Alabama. The Cooper revision includes some changes that were probably designed to make the book more user-friendly, especially for someone who is new to Sacred Harp. The decision to re-key some
21 Vaughn, Songs Before Unknown. Robert cites email correspondence with Karen Willard; I heard the same story from Stanley Smith.
59 of the songs, setting them in a range that was evidently closer to where they were actually being sung, has already been discussed. This would certainly help a relatively new group, as one of the greatest challenges in running a singing can be the “keying,” or setting the key in which the tune will be sung. If all the tunes are printed in a key that should work, then a singing could manage with a pitch pipe rather than depending on an experienced keyer. The title changes may have also been designed to ease new singers into the book. They reflect the standard practice of hymnals and gospel songbooks, making the Sacred Harp feel less foreign to a new singer. These updates may be signs that Sacred Harp singing in the area was not only active, but also growing. Cooper may have introduced new styles, but he and his contributors certainly knew the old ones, too. T. J. Allen’s “Glory Shone Around” (see example 3.1, p. 61)22 is an excellent example of a new tune in a very traditional style. It is a fuging tune, which is not a form associated with Northern reform hymnody or gospel song. The tune is written in dispersed harmony; not only is it written in the minor mode, rare in the “modern” styles, but it also has numerous perfect fifths. Equal-voiced polyphony dominates the texture even outside of the fuging section, with highly melodic parts for all voices. As a fuging tune, it is fairly complex, with a second round of entries starting in m. 11 before the texts line up again in m. 15. This is a well-written traditional fuging tune, and it would not have been out of place in one of B. F. White’s books. Of course, Cooper added some gospel songs, which are clearly in close harmony. Some songs were reprinted from other sources, such as “Dear Name! The Rock on Which I Stand,” Cooper’s arrangement of “Oh, How I Love Jesus” (see example 3.2, p. 62).23 There are also a number of original gospel songs, such as Cooper’s “Be Saved To-Night” (see example 3.3 , p. 63).24 Although there are clear examples of old and new styles in the Cooper book, there are also many tunes that exhibit some stylistic fluidity. It is fair to say that among the new tunes added to the 1902 Cooper book, there is a strong preference for tertian harmony, even among tunes in traditional styles if they are in a major key. For example, “Lord, Save” (see example 3.4, p. 64)25 has triads on almost every beat, including at the beginning and end of each phrase. Still, one can hardly say the
! tune is written in functional harmony; I! is often used at moments where one would expect to see some sort of V chord, the treble and tenor voices as written cross frequently starting at the second bar, and the 12th between the alto and treble in m. 12 is clearly not in any literal sense “close”
22 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 98. 23 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 367. 24 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 140. 25 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 184.
60 harmony.26 The form is also that of a traditional repeating plain tune, with revival-style text refrains. Although one cannot say the tune is in traditional “dispersed” harmony without qualifications, the triads are really the only unusual element, suggesting an influence of the new style rather than an abandonment of the old one.
Example 3.1: “Glory Shone Around”
The best examples of this fusion of old and new are the many tunes in what I call the “gospel hybrid” style. These tunes include characteristics of both traditional dispersed harmony tunes as well as gospel song, and cannot be easily labeled as one or the other. For example, “Will You Come?” (see example 3.5, p. 64)27 is written in the antebellum form of a repeating plain tune with refrain texts, as in “Save Mighty Lord.” The tune is even printed with the repeat instead of writing out the A section twice, which saves space but is also a visual cue for the revival style. This tune is likely meant to look like an old-style tune. Yet, in every other respect, it is in the gospel style.
26 If tenor was still a part associated with men, then it would be sung an octave below where it is printed and the voices would not actually cross. The introduction of the alto part may signal a loosening of gender roles by the early twentieth century. If there are both male and female trebles and tenors singing both parts in octaves, then the two voices will not only cross where printed, but they will also cross again an octave down. 27 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 184.
61 The verse text is nine syllables long, which is not one of the standard poetic meters, and overall the text’s uplifting invitation to salvation, all carrot and no stick, is more in line with a gospel song form of evangelism. The harmony is tertian throughout, with the amelodic bass and alto lines as signs of its simple tonal harmony. The dotted rhythms in mm. 6 and 14, as well as the antiphonal texture in mm. 8-11, also suggest the gospel style. It is too simple to say that this tune represents the old influencing the new, because the revival form is so distinctive and common throughout the book. This is a new musical style that has been applied to an old form.
Example 3.2: “Dear Name! The Rock on Which I Stand”
Minnie Floyd’s “Crown Him Lord of All” (see example 3.6, p. 65)28 is nearly impossible to categorize as anything but a hybrid. The text, “All hail the pow’r of Jesus’ name,” is an old traditional hymn, but the basic aaba construction of the chorus text (in this case, ddcd) is a fairly standard gospel chorus form. The dotted rhythms at the end of the verses and chorus, and particularly the antiphonal responses in m. 13 and 17, also suggest the gospel style. The final cadence ends on a complete triad, but the cadences in m. 5 and 9 lack thirds. One would also expect the
28 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 118.
62 ! cadence in m. 9, the end of the verse, to resolve on a I chord, but instead there is a deceptive I! chord. It would not be accurate to say that this is a traditional style tune with some gospel elements, or a gospel song with some elements drawn from the antebellum style. It represents a fusion of the two styles, written by someone fluent in both, and perhaps who did not draw any line between them.
Example 3.3: “Be Saved To-Night”
Example 3.4: “Lord, Save”
There is still one more possible musical influence in the 1902 Cooper book that is not routinely discussed: the music of the African Americans who lived in the area. Cooper’s anthem
63 “The Crucifixion” (see example 3.7, p. 66)29 features an unusual rhythm: a syncopation with a short note followed by a long note, often called a “Scotch snap.” While the reverse is common in the gospel style, pervasive use of the short-long combination is unusual for both four- and seven-shape tunebook music. It is sometimes found in antebellum tunes, but it is used sparingly, usually for emphasis, as in “Never Turn Back” (see example 4.7, p. 93). The rhythmic motive appears in the very first phrase, and then becomes more frequent and dramatic as the text moves into the description of Christ’s agony, finally driving the build into the climax on His last words. A listener familiar with nineteenth-century symphonic works may notice that the rhythmic motive repeated several times beginning at m. 56 on “All is darkness” is identical to one of the recurring rhythmic motives in Dvořák’s ninth symphony (see example 3.8, p. 68).30
Example 3.5: “Will You Come?”
Cooper was likely not quoting Dvořák, but like the Bohemian composer, he probably derived this motive from the music of African Americans, specifically the ancestors of the community that came to be known as the “wiregrass singers.” The wiregrass singers were African American Sacred Harp singers who lived in the same part of southern Alabama where the Cooper book originated, particularly around the town of Ozark, northwest of Dothan. They sang from the Cooper book as well as a supplemental book called The Colored Sacred Harp, published by Judge Jackson in 1934. These singers were active during the early to mid-twentieth century, although singing in these families has almost died out today. W. M. Cooper and B. P. Poyner taught singing
29 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 232-5. 30 Antonín Dvořák, Symphony No. 9, Op.95, ed. Otakar Šourek (Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1955), accessed October 7, 2014, International Scores Music Library Project, http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/54080.
64 schools for African American singers as well as whites, and according to at least one source, integrated singings were not unusual in his time.31 Sacred Harp singing among African Americans in southern Alabama dated at least as far back as 1880, when the Henry County convention, an African American convention, was founded.32
Example 3.6: “Crown Him Lord of All”
Sacred Harp singing is almost always associated with white singers, but the wiregrass region in Cooper’s day was unusually fertile ground for musical and cultural exchange between the races. While northern Alabama experienced a great deal of racial tension during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, southern Alabama had relatively amicable race relations for the time, the result of a relatively low African American population to compete with the white farmers (as most of the freed slaves had fled the southern plantations for the northern part of the state after Emancipation) and an unusually high number of Republicans.33 Editorials in The Dothan Eagle around this time demonstrate that while the white majority was oblivious to the inequalities faced by
31 Buell Cobb, Like Chords Around My Heart: A Sacred Harp Memoir (Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2014), 112. 32 Joe Dan Boyd, Judge Jackson and The Colored Sacred Harp (Montgomery: Alabama Folklife Association, 2002), 84. 33 Keith S. Hébert, “Ku Klux Klan in Alabama during the Reconstruction Era,” Encyclopedia of Alabama [http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2934] accessed September 14, 2014.
65 their neighbors, they were not blind to all the injustices that African Americans were suffering in the post-Reconstruction era and seem genuinely concerned for their well-being. One editorial criticized Theodore Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington—not because they objected to racial mixing or were concerned that the president would listen to an African American man, but because such actions stirred up what they saw as unnecessary trouble and would result in further voting restrictions and other forms of repression in retribution.34 Even as late as 1927, one paper published a strongly worded editorial that took a stance against the Ku Klux Klan and its violent practices.35
Example 3.7: “The Crucifixion”
34 “The Natural Effect,” Dothan Home Journal, v. 4 no. 50, February 3, 1903, p. 8. 35 Southern Star v. 60 no. 31 p. 1.
66
Example 3.7 continued
Example 3.8: Antonín Dvořák, Symphony no. 9, mvmt. 1, mm. 24-27, horn III
67 Although not published until more than thirty years after the first Cooper book, Judge Jackson’s Colored Sacred Harp does suggest the kinds of songs that were part of the wiregrass singers’ practice at that time, and some of the musical ideas could be from much older styles in their musical heritage. Most tunes are in the same styles as those found in the Cooper book, but a few do contain the same short-long rhythmic pattern. This is perhaps most evident in Jackson’s song “Florida Storm” (example 3.9).36 This song does not have the full long-short-short-long group of “The Crucifixion,” but it does demonstrate that the unusual short-long pair was part of the rhythmic vocabulary of African American Sacred Harp singers in the 1920s when this song was composed. Since most tunes in the Colored Sacred Harp are more rhythmically even, and this song’s secular text is also unusual for the book, the rhythm may be drawn from other music sung in the community.
Example 3.9: “Florida Storm,” chorus
36 Judge Jackson, The Colored Sacred Harp, ed. Judge Jackson (published by Judge Jackson, Ozark, Alabama, 1934, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 88-9. The rhythm of this excerpt, rather than duplicating the notation in the book, has been transcribed as sung in the recording of this tune on the 1993 album The Colored Sacred Harp: Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers, copyright Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc.
68 The more amicable race relations of the wiregrass region in the early twentieth century may have contributed to the somewhat less diasporic attitude of these early Cooper singers. Southern racism is particularly marked by fear—fear of slave revolts such as in Haiti, and later fear of freed slaves rising up against their former masters. Whereas in northern Alabama and Georgia, where the most conservative singers were found, social injustices and lynchings led to race riots, southern Alabama’s more peaceful and less fearful race relations may have helped this new present seem less “foreign.” And while Dothan was expanding rapidly, it was nothing compared to the growing metropolis of Atlanta. Since the forces that menaced Southerners, making them feel “as uprooted as the immigrant,” were less strong in southern Alabama at the turn of the century, it may explain why Cooper book singers were willing to accept some newness, or “assimilation,” in their Sacred Harp revision. Still, these singers were not immune to these regional forces, and something about the present still drove them to value this music of the antebellum past. Five years later, a new revision of the Cooper Sacred Harp demonstrated that there was a limit to how many new ideas the singers of southern Alabama (and by this time, Texas and perhaps Florida as well) would accept.
The 1907 Cooper Sacred Harp
The first revision of the Cooper Sacred Harp only had one printing and is extremely rare today. For this study, I have been unable to view a copy of the 1907 book, but I do have an index compiled by another singer and some information from Robert Vaughn and his Songs Before Unknown, a forthcoming book on the history of the Cooper Sacred Harp and its composers. As in the 1902 book, Cooper removed some tunes, presumably those that were not being used, and replaced them with new tunes. What is unusual is that almost all of the new tunes were printed on a two-staff piano score with the melody in the soprano, instead of the traditional four-staff format with the melody in the tenor. In addition to these new tunes, twenty older tunes were also converted to piano score, including some fuging tunes. One of these 1907 piano-staff tunes, “The Lord’s Promise” (see example 3.10, p. 70)37 was still in piano-staff in the 1909 edition, and it seems a safe assumption that it is representative of what these tunes looked like in the 1907 edition. Without the book, including the preface, one can only guess why Cooper made this choice. It is possible that he was simply trying to save space. That he chose only to cull and replace tunes (as White did in his first revision) rather than adding a new appendix (as White did in his later revisions) suggests that Cooper wanted to keep the book the same size and weight. This is an important
37 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1909), 362.
69 consideration for a book often held up in one hand, perhaps for hours. No page in the 1907 Cooper contains more than two songs, though, and many of the tunes were already only a half page. Another possibility is that Cooper switched to the piano score for the same reason that gospel publishers did: it is easier for keyboardists to read. This would suggest church use and the possible influence of reform practices. Two of the new tunes are popular hymns from the Bostonian hymn reforms of the early nineteenth century: Thomas Hastings’s “Rock of Ages” and Lowell Mason’s “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Other new tunes are also still very familiar today: the gospel song “Sweet By and By,” the eighteenth-century hymn “Cleansing Fountain,” and the patriotic song “My Country ’tis of Thee.” This would again suggest possible catering to modern Protestant churches. Two of the tunes appearing in piano staff, “Holy City” and “I’m On my Journey Home,” are in minor keys, however, and the reform hymns are almost always in major keys. There are also three fuging tunes printed in piano score: two new, “Repose in Jesus” and “The Bitter Cup,” and one from the nineteenth century, “Heavenly Rest.” These would not have been conducive to congregational singing without a high number of Sacred Harp singers present, although a choir could perform them. These may have been printed with optional de-fugues, as in the Christian Harmony, but the two fuging tunes that were new in 1907 do not appear with any optional passages in the 1909 book.
Example 3.10: “The Lord’s Promise”
It is difficult to guess why Cooper chose to print twenty older tunes in piano score, and the three new tunes that were printed on the traditional four staves are equally mysterious. Cooper composed one, “A Voice We Love is Stilled,” and collaborated on another, “Cross for You and Me,” so it is unlikely that these were printed on four staves because the author objected to the piano staff. “Cross for You and Me” is also a gospel hybrid tune, and so its gospel roots might actually make it a more logical choice for piano staff. The remaining tune, “Robed in Spotless White,” is a
70 fuging tune. Of course the fuging tunes would be less suited to this format, but three other fuging tunes were printed on piano scores, and this is no more complex than the others. The 1907 edition was evidently unpopular. Perhaps the piano staves were too unfamiliar for singers accustomed to reading the scores, although gospel publishers were using this format and Sacred Harp singers probably sang both styles. If singers also connected this instrument-friendly format with modern styles, however, then perhaps they rejected the book because it strayed too far from tradition. One new tune does reinforce the importance of specifically antebellum nostalgia in this population. “Long Ago, Comrades” (see example 3.11)38 is a patriotic song of sorts, the reminiscence of an old Confederate veteran looking back fondly on the pride and optimism he and his fellow CSA soldiers felt at the start of the Civil War and mourning the loss of both war and youth. The fifth verse is particularly rife with New South sentiments: “We fell, but we are risen now again,” as well as the idea that they have not lost that which made them strong.
Example 3.11: “Long Ago, Comrades”
38 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1909), 520.
71 The 1909 Cooper Sacred Harp
The preface of the 1909 Cooper book begins with a mea culpa. Cooper admitted that “these changes and additions did not commend themselves to the favor of a great many people, other than those who care to play them on piano or organ,” acknowledging that the two-staff format appeals to instrumentalists.39 Most of his audience was evidently not using instruments and wanted the old four-staff format. Keyboard instruments such as the piano and organ are instruments of the middle class and wealthier, urban churches, and Cooper’s miscalculation may tell us a few things about his market. Urban singers, such as Cooper himself, as a resident of Dothan, may have been less likely to use the Sacred Harp in worship services. The addition of some piano staff tunes may have been designed to appeal to that market, but as most tunes were still printed on four staves, the book was still not terribly practical for a congregation who did not want to sing a cappella. This also suggests that urban singers were still mostly singing tunes unaccompanied when they did sing Sacred Harp out of deference to the traditional practice, even though they may have had access to keyboard instruments. Another possibility is that Cooper’s time in Dothan had left him out of touch with rural singers, who were less likely to have access to such large and expensive instruments, although five years is not much time for a man to forget decades of farm life. Evidently Cooper also went a bit too far with the tunes that he cut, as he goes on to assure singers that the old tunes have been restored to their original pages and on four staves. The new tunes are still included but also on four staves and in a new appendix. This appendix, which also included thirty additional new tunes, substantially increased the size of the book. Cooper did not actually restore all the tunes that he had cut in 1907, however; of the forty-seven he originally cut, only eighteen were actually restored. Two of the new tunes from 1907 do not appear in the 1909 revision, suggesting that they were already proving unpopular. Overall, the new tunes added in 1907 and in 1909 are stylistically in line with those added in 1902. Some are in traditional styles, but most favor tertian harmony and there are many gospel songs and gospel hybrid tunes. There were not any reform hymns added in 1902, but as B. F. White did include some in his fourth edition, they are not new to the Sacred Harp style either.
39 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1909), 8.
72 Cooper’s Life after 1909
Dothan continued its expansion during this period, and the increasing number of rail lines both facilitated the dispersal of Cooper’s book and supported Sacred Harp singing in Dothan. Newspapers in 1902 reported on stories in many towns in the Florida panhandle, suggesting that there was already a close connection between south Alabama and north Florida. A new direct rail line between Dothan and Panama City opened in 1908, and newspaper advertisements and the society pages indicate that the Florida city quickly became a favorite vacation spot for the residents of Dothan.40 The Dothan Eagle describes a “Sacred Harp singers’ outing in Panama City” on December 8-9 of 1910.41 Although this was the Thursday and Friday after the first Sunday in the month, one wonders if this was perhaps an early form of the Florida State Convention, now held in Panama City on the first Sunday in December and the Saturday before. Cooper also travelled to Texas, where most of the older conventions adopted his book. Newspapers document at least one trip to a convention in Dallas in 1910.42 After the 1909 edition was published, Cooper’s life changed again. His son-in-law established a citrus company with another Blackshear, and some time after 1910 R. D. Blackshear left his Dothan practice and moved the family, W. M. Cooper included, to West Palm Beach. The company purchased a large tract of land in the area and then sold it in chunks to farmers who wanted to try their luck in south Florida. One advertisement even offers that the company will clear the land and plant a grapefruit grove on behalf of the owner, who is not expected to relocate to his new property until the trees begin to bear fruit.43 The company must have failed, and by 1920 the Blackshears were renting a home in Panama City.44 W. M. Cooper did not live to see this move; he died in West Palm Beach in 1916. His death certificate lists his cause of death as cerebral hemorrhage. His body was transported to Dothan by train for his funeral and burial, which was front-page news.45
40 Fred S. Watson, Hub of the Wiregrass: A history of Houston County, Alabama, 1903-1972 (Anniston, Alabama: Higginbotham, Inc., 1972), 181. 41 “Sacred Harp Singers’ Outing in Panama City,” Dothan Weekly Eagle v. 7 no. 19 (December 4, 1910), 1. 42 Ancestry.com. The Dothan Eagle (Dothan, Alabama) [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. Original data: The Dothan Eagle. Dothan, AL, USA. Database created from microfilm copies of the newspaper. 43 Ads from The Dothan Eagle, July 16 1949, p. 9; August 3 1914 p. 5. 44 "United States Census, 1920," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/MNYW-929 : accessed 30 Sep 2014), R D Blackshear, Panama City, Bay, Florida, United States; citing sheet 9B, family 226, NARA microfilm publication T625, FHL microfilm 1820215. 45 Dothan Home Journal, v. 18 no. 19, July 20, 1916, p. 1 The Dothan Eagle v. 9 no. 254, July 18, 1916, p. 1
73 Cooper’s last revision was published in the same year that the north Georgia singers began to release revisions, and so we do not know how or if he might have changed his book in response to the approaches of those publishers. Still, his landmark work initiated the dispersal of the Sacred Harp diaspora, as singers now had two Sacred Harp books from which they might choose: the 1897 reprint of the fourth edition and the Cooper Sacred Harp. The settings of tunes sung by area residents and incorporation of both gospel and possibly African American stylistic elements gave the Cooper book a unique southern Alabama flavor. Much like after the death of B. F. White, the Cooper singers seem to have lost some steam with the death of their leader. It would be almost twenty years before another Cooper revision was released, and then in another new South after another war. By that time, the retrospective approach to singing was beginning to creep into the Dothan area, which may have also slowed the development of new editions.
74 CHAPTER 4
CASE STUDY: WOMEN AND THE ALTO IN SACRED HARP
The four-part harmony associated with Sacred Harp singing today was also standard in the tunebooks of eighteenth-century New England. When B. F. White published the first edition of his Sacred Harp, however, it primarily contained tunes in three-part harmony: treble, tenor, and bass. The alto was popularized in Sacred Harp singing during the early twentieth century in revised versions of The Sacred Harp, beginning with W. M. Cooper’s first revision in 1902, in which an alto was added to all three-part tunes. Although there was some initial resistance, the part became ubiquitous by mid- century, and low female voices play an important role in the Sacred Harp sound even in the earliest recordings. Modern singers are then mystified as to why the part was largely absent from the nineteenth-century books and wonder what low-voiced women sang, if not alto. Scholars have thus far not addressed these questions. This chapter is an initial exploration of why a part that had previously been commonplace in tunebook singing is largely absent in White’s nineteenth-century books but was then added to the Sacred Harp editions of the twentieth century. The answer may pertain to the age, gender, and voices of those who were singing low treble staff parts, as well as the role of married women in each place and time. The part was not always associated with women, and the resurgence of the alto is tied to the new prominence of the female voice in the sound and style of twentieth-century Sacred Harp.
Gender, Puberty, and Voice Parts in Eighteenth-Century New England
To understand why the alto, or counter, as it was then called, fell out of favor in the nineteenth century, it is important to understand the role of the part in the eighteenth century. In New England, tunebooks were most often used in two social settings: in the singing schools, where students learned to sing and read music, and in churches, where choirs would perform some pieces during worship services.1 Both of these areas were strongly associated with youth culture. Although the singing masters were usually adults, singing school students were generally teenagers or young adults; singing schools were actually an important social site for young men and women to meet and mingle.2 Graduates of the singing schools might then join their church choirs, but choir members
1 Karl Kroeger, ed., Early American Anthems, Part 1: Anthems for Public Celebrations (Madison: A-R Editions, 2000), xi. 2 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), 60-1.
75 were typically expected to leave the choir after marrying.3 The average age at first marriage in Boston during the late eighteenth century was about twenty-five for men and between twenty-two and twenty-three for women.4 We can therefore assume that most tunebook music in the late eighteenth century was intended primarily for singers in their teens through mid-twenties.5 This mostly adolescent voice group is markedly different from the all-ages inclusive singing associated with Sacred Harp, and it creates some very particular needs because of the effects of puberty on the voice. Boys’ voices undergo dramatic changes during puberty, particularly in the early stages of pubescence. The most active period of voice change in boys in the United States today usually begins at around age twelve to thirteen. Over the course of about fourteen months, boy’s voices progress through three “midvoice” periods, where the voice has limited range and dexterity. After this most active period of change, boys’ voices settle into a “new baritone” and then transition more slowly into adult ranges by around seventeen or eighteen.6 Better nutrition as well as possible environmental factors caused the age at which puberty begins to fall rapidly in developed countries during the twentieth century, so for eighteenth-century boys this process probably began and concluded about three to four years later than is typical today, with voice change beginning around age sixteen and adult ranges forming in the early twenties (figure 4.1).7 Still, most young men probably did have adult voice ranges for a few years before leaving the primary tunebook singing population. Finding a choral role for boys in their midvoice periods, however, has always been a challenge.
Age: 10 15 20 25 !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! Adult voice Midvoice New Baritone Marriage Figure 4.1: Puberty and marriage for men in late eighteenth-century Boston
3 Karl Kroeger, ed., Early American Anthems, xvii. 4 Maris A. Vinovskis, Fertility in Massachusetts from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 43-45. 5 Karl Kroeger, ed. Early American Anthems, xvii. 6 John Cooksey, “Voice Transformation in Male Adolescents” in Bodymind and Voice, ed. Leon Thurman and Graham Welch (Minneapolis: Voice Center of Fairview, 2000), 722. 7 Herbert Moller, “Voice Change in Human Biological Development,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 16 no. 2 (Autumn, 1985), 241. S. F. Daw, “Age of Boys’ Puberty in Leipzig, 1727-49, as Indicated by Voice Breaking in J. S. Bach’s Choir Members,” Human Biology 42 no. 1 (1970), 87-89.
76 Tunebook publishers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally associated the counter with boys. These boys were almost certainly those who were in a midvoice period, no longer able to sing in a high treble range but not yet able to sing tenor or bass. The average range of the counter parts in Richard Crawford’s Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody is a close fit to the average range during most of the midvoice period, especially if the music was sung a bit lower than A=440 hertz (figure 4.2). Not only is the range appropriate, but the counter also tends to require the least vocal agility, which would again accomodate clumsy midvoices.8 The use of counter as an intermediate voice for pubescent boys also reflects eighteenth-century European practices. For example, in his choirs in Leipzig, J. S. Bach moved boys from soprano to alto when their voices began to change, then on to tenor once their voices settled.9
Average range Unchanged Midvoice I Midvoice II Midvoice IIA New Baritone of counter Figure 4.2: The range of the counter and the adolescent male voice
Tunebook publishers also recommended that a few low-voiced women might support the boys on counter, but overall, the female voice was strongly associated with the soprano register and treble part. Even the male/female doubling of treble and tenor that we associate with Sacred Harp singing seems to have been somewhat unusual in this period; William Billings advocated it, but most publishers never mention the practice.10 Although this identification of the female voice as primarily soprano may seem limiting, it may also be a reflection of the realities of the demography. The changes are less dramatic than in boys, but girls’ voices also change significantly during puberty. The start of female voice change seems to be closely tied to the menarche, which again is usually around age twelve in the modern American population.11 Some girls temporarily lose their
8 Karl Kroeger, ed., Early American Anthems, xvii. 9 Andrew Parrott, The Essential Bach Choir (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000), 13. 10 Karl Kroeger, ed., Early American Anthems, xvii. 11 Lynne Gackle, “Understanding Voice Transformation in Female Adolescents,” in Bodymind and Voice, ed. Leon Thurman and Graham Welch (Minneapolis: Voice Center of Fairview, 2000), 740-1.
77 high register in the early stages of vocal change;12 the low-voiced women supporting the boys in the counter section may have been such girls, or possibly older girls with more developed voices. Although they may favor a certain register, adolescent girls are never true sopranos or true altos. Women’s voices develop more slowly than those of men; true alto voices rarely manifest before women are college-aged.13 As with boys, puberty in girls began somewhat later in the eighteenth century. The average age at menarche in Boston at that time was probably closer to fifteen or sixteen.14 This would suggest that alto voices typically formed right around the time when most young women were marrying (see Figure 4.3). Low-voiced women played a limited role in eighteenth-century Boston’s tunebook culture because the majority of the women who were singing were not old enough to have developed a rich low voice.
Age: 10 15 20 25 !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! Adult voice Menarche Marriage Figure 4.3: Puberty and marriage for women in late eighteenth-century Boston
Nineteenth-century shape-note composers may have dropped the counter because they preferred the sound of three-part harmony. Dropping a voice from the texture may have also been designed to reduce the difficulty, although that would be an odd choice in a culture that also valued challenging fuging tunes and anthems. Given that the eighteenth-century counter was designed to fit the special needs of a specific population, boys in their midvoice period, its disappearance may suggest that the part ceased to be useful in the next century. Even in the eighteenth century, the part had a somewhat precarious existence. Because many singing masters seem to have preferred a much smaller counter section relative to the other three parts, and boys’ voices are often at their weakest during the midvoice period, it is not difficult to imagine that the counter might often be hard to hear. Nathanial Gould indicated that in many cases the boys were not able to sing the part independently, but older singers had difficulty singing in the correct range to support them. In the
12 Lynn Gackle, “Female Adolescent Transforming Voices: Voice Classification, Voice Skill Development, and Music Literature Selection,” in Bodymind and Voice, ed. Leon Thurman and Graham Welch (Minneapolis: Voice Center of Fairview, 2000), 816. 13 Paul F. Roe, Choral Music Education (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), 27. 14 Jane Beckman Lancaster, Beatrix A. Hamburg, eds., School-age Pregnancy and Parenthood: Biosocial Dimensions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 306.
78 face of such problems, according to Gould, the counter was sometimes omitted.15 Perhaps some singing masters already regarded the part as disposable, something that adolescent boys could sing when they were too weak to sing anything else, but not always an essential part of the music. In fact, some New England tunesmiths in the late eighteenth century may have been writing music designed to be sung without a counter, if needed. Omitting the counter in a plain tune is straightforward, since all four voices sing together in familiar style. The tune might lose some harmonic color, but as there generally is not a strong tonal drive in this style anyway, the harmonies should still work. Fuging tunes are much more problematic, as each voice part must enter independently during the fuging section. Still, all four voices might not always be completely necessary. About half of the fuging tunes and anthems in Crawford’s Core Repertory may have been written with a disposable counter in mind. In four-voice fuging tunes, the voices usually enter in one of two standard patterns: bass!tenor!counter!treble, or bass!tenor!treble!counter. In the first pattern, where the voices enter from the lowest to highest staff in the system, omitting the counter would disrupt the regular phrase rhythm of the fugal entries. The gap where the counter should enter could be jarring for the listener (see example 4.1, p. 80).16 The second pattern, where the counter enters last, is just as common, but it raises interesting questions. There is not an immediately obvious reason for this pattern to be used so frequently. It lacks the logic of the previous pattern, in which the voices enter in reverse score order, building energy by raising the tessitura upward. This second pattern does correspond to the order of the voice parts in a Sacred Harp-style hollow square: the leader cues the basses on her right, the tenors in front of her, the trebles to her left, and the altos behind her. Although the Yankee singing schools may not have been using hollow squares, and certainly the church choirs almost certainly were not, it is possible that some singing schools were conducted around tables with the students seated by voice parts and in this order. It should be noted, however, that in this pattern, the phrase rhythm of the fugal entries would not be affected by omitting the counter. Although it might still be a bit odd, the other three voices are usually still melodically active and highly independent through the
15 Nathanial D. Gould, Church Music in America (Boston: A.N. Johnson, 1853. Facsimile reprint by AMS Press, Inc., 1972), 94. 16 Daniel Read, The American Singing Book (New Haven, 1785), 53. Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 19213 (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], April 1, 2015. Printed in Richard Crawford, ed., The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody (Madison: A-R Editions, 1984), 141-42.
79 counter’s entry, and the counterpoint should provide enough interest to propel the tune to the typically equal-voiced final phrase without a gaping hole (see example 4.2, p. 82).17
Example 4.1: “Sherburne,” Daniel Read, 1785
Omitting the counter would also leave textural holes in sections of some anthems, but not all. Not every anthem features sections of fuga, and so those with equal-voiced polyphony throughout or with a combination of four-voice and voice-pair sections would not suffer from the loss of the counter any more than the simple plain tunes. In some anthems with passages of vocal independence, the counter is noticeably less independent than the other voices and can be omitted with minimal disruption. William Billings’s “Anthem for Easter: The Lord Is Risen Indeed” (see example 4.3, p. 82) includes many sections of voice exchange and fuga.18 The counter is consistently late or last to enter
17 [Simeon Jocelin], The Chorister’s Companion (New Haven, 1782), 62. Accessed via Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 17988, (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], accessed April 2, 2015. Printed in Richard Crawford, ed., The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody, 22. Set with the text that Crawford indicated was most frequently published with the tune. 18 From Oliver Holden, The Union Harmony, vol I (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793), 107-11. Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 25619 (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], accessed April 1, 2015. Printed in Richard Crawford, ed., The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody, 8-12.
80 the texture, facilitating its possible omission. In the first of these passages, mm. 31-38, the treble and tenor exchange the top line of a duet with the bass on “Hallelujah.” The counter does not join until the end of this imitative exchange, when the familiar style resumes. During the next section, fuga on “And did he rise?” in mm. 39-45, the counter does sing a final statement of the text independent from the other three voices and in a faster rhythm that drives to the cadence. The treble, tenor and bass are already holding the final chord of the phrase, however, and so a three-voice performance without the counter could easily omit m. 45. After a brief homorhythmic section in mm. 46-51, the treble and tenor again alternate in a duet with the bass. The counter enters with the treble to form a trio in m. 59, and then the tenor joins in m. 61, concluding the passage. If the counter were omitted, then the treble entry in m. 59 would actually be more symmetrical in the context of the rest of the texture. The treble sings a duet with the bass on “He rose” in mm. 52-54, which is then passed to the tenor in mm. 54-56. The tenor would continue in duet with the bass on “He burst the bars of death” in mm. 57-58, and then pass the duet back to the treble at m. 59, reentering the texture in the final statement of “He burst the bars of death” in m. 61. The absence of the counter would actually make this melodic arch more prominent. Finally, in mm. 67-76, the treble and tenor exchange another motive on “Then I rose,” in duet with the bass. The counter does not join until the end of the section, when equal-voice polyphony resumes. The counter is featured in duet with the bass in mm. 87-93, but this extended duet could easily be for basses alone, if the counter were omitted. This would not be incongruous with the style of the anthem, which already has two exposed passages for the bass: one at the beginning (mm. 1-4), and another shortly after at mm. 15-22. The counter’s melody line jumps to the tenor near the end of the section, just before the treble’s final entry. Without the counter, this section would be a bass passage ending with a crescendo of textural complexity leading up to the final bar. These stylistic choices may be a matter of musical tastes; for example, perhaps the counter is used less in these pieces because the timbre was not favored and so composers wanted to hear the section as little as possible. It is possible, however, that some Yankee tunesmiths were intentionally composing pieces that could work with or without a counter section. Such tunes would also be useful if the counter section was present but weak, as it would not matter if the boys could not be heard or missed their entrance entirely. As these tunes worked their way south, the counter occasionally became disposable, by design or not. Although Read’s “Sherburne” appeared in White’s Sacred Harp with all four voice parts, Steven Jenks’ fuging tunes “Mount Vernon” and “Liberty”
81 were printed in only three parts,19 even though Jenks did publish them with a fourth part, in this case a second treble, in his tunebook The New-England Harmonist.20 At some point in the tunes’ transmission, someone must have decided that a gap in the phrase rhythm was preferable to having a counter (see example 4.4, p. 84, and example 4.5, p. 85).
Example 4.2: “Bridgewater,” Lewis Edson, 1782
Example 4.3: “Anthem for Easter: The Lord is Risen Indeed,” William Billings, 1787
19 B. F White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, fourth edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 110 and 137. 20 Steven Jenks, The New England Harmonist (Danbury, CT: Douglas & Nichols, 1800), 41 and 49. Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 37707 (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], accessed December 3, 2009.
82
Example 4.3 continued
83
Example 4.3 continued
Example 4.4: “Liberty,” from The New-England Harmonist (1800), excerpt, mm. 6-10
84
Example 4.5: “Liberty,” from The Sacred Harp (1870), excerpt, mm. 6-10
The Counter and Women in Nineteenth-Century Sacred Harp
Once tunebook singing left New England, it entered new social settings. Frontier churches did not typically have the formal choirs of New England congregationalism. Instead, singing school graduates began to gather to sing tunebook music as a Christian fellowship often independent of formal worship, first in local singings and then in marathon regional sessions called conventions.21 There were many four-shape tunebooks in use in the South and Midwest by the start of the Civil War, but two of the most popular, most enduring, and therefore arguably most important were B. F. White’s Sacred Harp and its ancestor, William Walker’s Southern Harmony. Walker’s Southern Harmony, first published in 1835, contains tunes in primarily three parts. B. F. White was Walker’s brother-in- law and supposedly assisted Walker with the compilation of his book, although White was not credited. White then moved and began work on his own book, The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844. It, too, is primarily in three parts and draws heavily from The Southern Harmony’s repertoire.22 One can only speculate as to why Walker chose to publish his book largely without a counter, but perhaps singing activities in his area were so popular he anticipated that his book would be used in at least one large convention. Such groups may have added more pressure on this weak part. Men certainly participated in conventions during their whole lives. We know that these gatherings were an important site of community exchange and tunebook dissemination, so the leaders, who were adult men, would need to be present.23 Descriptions of tunebook singing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to be discussed later in this chapter also point to the attendance of adult men. The addition of still more adult male voices likely made the counter inaudible. Even if they were strong singers, a reasonable number of adolescent boys simply could not be expected to carry a part and balance it among the other three parts in a convention setting
21 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp, 129-30. 22 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp, 75. 23 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp, 128.
85 with many adult men. If women had also continued to sing into adulthood, those who developed alto voices could have provided the power needed to support the part, but B. F. White’s rudiments (which look suspiciously similar to William Walker’s rudiments) suggest that most women singing Sacred Harp were singing in the high register.24 White’s understanding of how voices should be distributed through the various parts is very similar to that of the eighteenth-century singing masters. Although most tunes in White’s Sacred Harp were written for three voices only, the counter was usually retained in those older tunes that had one. The counter is mentioned in the rudiments section, which states that it was to be assigned to “the gravest of female, and boys voices.”25 Still, White seems to understand women’s voices as lying primarily in the soprano register. When describing the range of the human voice in a diagram called “The General Scale,” the rudiments state that the female voice is “naturally an octave above the male’s and to females the treble is usually assigned.”26 Although the author does explain where the counter would lie on the general scale, female voices are only discussed as part of the women’s treble staff, which is an octave above the men’s tenor staff. One must assume that the low female voice was an oddity in Sacred Harp singing.27 One possible explanation for this overwhelming perception of women as sopranos is that if the singing masters understood women’s voices to be high, then they may not have encouraged women to explore the lower parts of their voices as they developed. Therefore, even if older women were singing, those who had the potential to be altos may have been forcing themselves into a more mezzo-soprano role. The relative absence of music for the low female voice could suggest that nineteenth-century Southern women were also expected to stop singing after marriage, likely before their mature voices could develop. Perhaps during the conventions, these women instead focused on caring for children too young to sing or performed other domestic duties to support the gathering. Buell Cobb’s memoir, Like Chords Around My Heart, is full of anecdotes and characters from his lifetime as a Denson singer. As he retells the stories he collected from older singers, many now deceased, he offers glimpses into a period of (primarily Denson and James book singing) history
24 White’s rudiments are largely lifted from Walker’s Southern Harmony, and all of the text and diagrams discussed here were first printed in the Southern Harmony. I will discuss the rudiments, however, as representative of White’s opinions. Since he did rephrase some lines, we know that he must not have been using the same plates, and therefore could have changed any sections with which he disagreed. If White did indeed work closely with his brother-in-law on the Southern Harmony, only to be uncredited, it is even possible that White was the original author of part or all of these rudiments. 25 B. F White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, 4th edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 11. 26 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 12. 27 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 12-3.
86 now outside of living memory. A number of these stories support the idea that the participation of adult women may have been more limited in earlier times. For example, he stated that the Chattahoochee convention held particular importance for Ruth Denson Edwards (1893-1978) because her mother attended it when Ruth was an infant. Ruth, however, did not; her mother was able to attend only because they found a wet nurse for Ruth, allowing her mother to join her father.28 This tells us not only that women with very small children probably would have stayed home, but also that fathers would have attended without their spouses and children. Indeed, some fathers may have favored attendance at singings over what may seem to be important family events. Cobb also relates a moment at the 1997 Cullman Courthouse singing when an elderly singer, Arrie Chandler, announced it was his seventy-ninth birthday and said, “On this day in 1918 my mother was home giving birth to me, but my daddy was at the Cullman courthouse for the singing.”29 In 1918, his wife’s heavy pregnancy was not enough to dissuade Mr. Chandler from attendance. Those women who were at the singing may not always have been singing, either. In a humorous anecdote from another singer about an unintentional interjection during “David’s Lamentation,”30 the perpetrators are described as “a couple of women – non-singers evidently, though maybe, for the event, collard- or other-vegetable-cookers,” who were talking in the back. Unfortunately Cobb does not give any information to date the event, saying only that it happened “decades back.”31 Still, this suggests that “decades back,” women might have sometimes cooked rather than sung, perhaps if there were not enough local women who were not singers but were willing to work to support the event. Even today, the alto section is sometimes greatly reduced during the hour before dinner because women still tend to do most of the work setting up the potluck. Literature from the period offers a glimpse of what three-voice Sacred Harp singing might have looked like. In Stars Fell on Alabama, Carl Carmer described his visit to an insular group of Sacred Harp singers who still rejected the alto line in the 1920s, even though the James revision they were singing from includes alto lines for almost every tune. In Carmer’s telling, the singers did not sit in a hollow square, but rather on three sides of a large platform on which the leaders stood:
28 Buell Cobb, Like Chords Around My Heart: A Sacred Harp Memoir (Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2014), 86. 29 Ibid., 263. 30 This went as follows: “Oh my son!” “I fried mine in butter.” 31 Ibid., 257-8.
87 We sat on wooden benches with single plank backs. A center aisle led down to the platform which was surrounded by benches on three sides. A tall man stood on the platform. “Trebles on the left. Basses on the right. Tenors in the center.” “What about alto?” I whispered to Knox. “Don’t mention the word,” he said. The real Sacred Harpers think it’s a newfangled and wicked affectation.”32
The absence of the now-ubiquitous hollow square, denying even a space for the altos, undeniably merits attention. Additionally, the only female singers Carmer describes are young and single, with particular attention given to a treble in an orange dress who skips out on the afternoon session to flirt with a boy. During the morning session,
The trebles, screaming, rode above. In the front row a slim brown-eyed girl in an orange dress was throwing her head from side to side in the rhythm. Her black hair had fallen from a knot at the back of her neck, and flew about her face. She was gasping for breath.33
During the midday break,
Down in the gully behind the church was a spring. Young girls in bands of four or five strolled toward it, loitered on the way back. Disorganized groups of embarrassed boys followed. The girls seemed not to notice but their laughter was shrill.34
During the afternoon session,
More and more leaders were called on. The restless feeling, the suppressed excitement returned. But I noticed that the girl in the orange dress was no longer in the front row.35
After the singing,
32Carl Carmer, Stars Fell on Alabama (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1934, new edition 2000), 51. 33 Ibid., 54-5. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Ibid., 56.
88 I glanced back toward the spring. An orange dress burned through the gathering dusk. Beside it towered a dark figure. Behind them stretched a long line of couples, girls no longer shrill and boys no longer shy.36
Even the description of how the girl sang has sexual undertones; she is screaming and gasping for breath, her hair in disarray around her face, as she rides above. Her orange dress burns through the dark when she stands with a possible beau. She is the object of male attention, both Carmer’s attention and later that of the dark, towering figure. His book stands somewhere between a memoir and a novel, and this particular girl may be fictional, but something about the day drew Carmer to highlight young people and courtship. This echoes the youth culture of the colonial era singings, which girls might attend with the aim of finding a spouse. There does not seem to be any shortage of adult men, however, suggesting that the boys would continue to attend as they grew up. The man who brought Carmer to the singing, Knox, was actually there to drum up support for a political candidate, which meant that he must have expected a significant percentage of the attendees would be adults of voting age. Some evidence that single women had more freedom to participate in Sacred Harp singing can be found by reviewing the names of the handful of nineteenth-century female composers. In White’s Sacred Harp editions, every female composer is listed with the title “Miss,” suggesting that she was unmarried. One might then assume that only single women composed, or that the tunes of married women were not considered for publication. According to their biographies in Warren Steel’s Makers of the Sacred Harp, however, this was not necessarily true; some of these women married before their tunes were published. Additionally, all the tunes by married women are published under the author’s maiden name. The deception was probably on the part of the publishers trying to mislead the singers rather than the women trying to mislead the publishers. For example, Miss Sarah Lancaster was a family friend of the Whites, and so when B. F. White added her tune “The Last Words of Copernicus” to his 1870 edition, he almost certainly would have known that she had become Mrs. G. W. Hagler in 1866.37 The fact that the tunes were printed under the women’s names, if not always their most current ones, suggests the respect that White and his committee had for these composers. Men’s names were usually given as a first and middle initial; a similar approach could have given a degree of anonymity and obscured the gender of a female composer. The tunes could also be printed
36 Ibid., 57. 37 David Warren Steel with Richard Hulan, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 131.
89 anonymously if the committee was more interested in publishing the tune than crediting the composer. The decision to print a woman’s tune under her maiden name and with the title “Miss” therefore walks a fine line, giving the composer credit while also obscuring her marital status at the time of the tune’s composition, presumably to avoid the possible scandal resulting from the publication of a married woman’s tune. After the Civil War, the role of women in Southern society began to change. Southern women enjoyed relatively more autonomy than their Northern counterparts because Civil War casualties accounted for a larger percentage of the white male population in former Confederate states than in the Union. Southern women were therefore more likely to continue to fill the roles of men after the war.38 B. F. White’s 1870 edition suggests that Sacred Harp singing was no exception to these larger social changes. This edition’s new appendix includes a sharp increase in newly composed four-voice tunes. By this time many of White’s competitors had switched to a four-voice and seven-shape style, and the four-voice Sacred Harp tunes could be a response to that trend. Many of these new four-voice tunes are fuging tunes, however, which suggests that all parts would be well supported; women must have been carrying the counter.39 Additionally, the seven-shape books increasingly favored newer musical styles, such as the Yankee reform hymns of Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings, as well as early gospel songs. Most of the new tunes in The Sacred Harp fourth edition are still in the traditional style, aside from the extra voice, and this complicates the idea of four voices as the product of stylistic influence. Perhaps more of these newly enfranchised Southern women were singing at a later age, and if this also introduced more altos into the conventions, composers could write a fourth part that lies primarily at the bottom of the treble staff and know that singers could manage it. This small shift in practice hinted at the revolution that was to come in the next century.
The Alto in Early Cooper Book Singing
W. M. Cooper’s addition of an alto line to all tunes previously lacking one is often associated with the stylistic influence of early Southern gospel and other four-voice, seven-shape books. Although the idea of four-part singing may have come from these traditions, Wallace McKenzie demonstrated that the new Cooper alto parts are generally in the contrapuntal style of the other parts, with few of the alleged harmonic disturbances that Cooper’s loudest critic, Joe James, pointed
38 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28. 39 David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp, 51.
90 to as proof of his unfamiliarity with the traditional style.40 Interestingly, according to Cooper’s 1902 introduction, the alto lines were added not to suit his aesthetic values but because many singers requested them.41 Cooper does not identify these singers, but I suspect that they were the very women who would be singing the new part. The real significance of the addition of alto parts is that it created a new space for adult women to add their voices to Sacred Harp. Women played a significant role in shaping the new book. Cooper wrote almost half of the alto lines added to his revision, but just as many were written by women, with nearly a quarter contributed by his married daughter, Mrs. R. D. Blackshear (see figure 4.4, p. 92). This likely helped to ensure that the part was a good fit for the voices of the women who would sing it. The alto lines composed by men and women alike often did not relegate the part to secondary importance. In many cases, the alto line plays a significant role in the counterpoint, literally making women’s voices more prominent in the singing. One example is the alto that Minnie Floyd added to Sarah Lancaster’s “Last Words of Copernicus” (see example 4.6, p. 92).42 All three of the original parts must share the stage with the new alto. The alto typically enters third or fourth in four-voice fuging tunes, but just as omitting the counter might disrupt the phrase rhythm of an eighteenth-century fuging tune, a newly added alto cannot have an independent fugal entry. New alto lines must share an entry with another voice. If the goal was to add a part in as unobtrusive a manner as possible, then the alto could join the fugue with the trebles in m. 14, or even wait until the final phrase at m. 17. Instead, the alto enters with the bass, eliminating the bass solo that customarily opens fuging sections. The alto’s melisma in m. 13 distracts from the tenors’ flashy, rapid descent of a M6, and then the treble feature over a bass drone in m. 16-17 becomes a treble/alto duet. Because of the line’s melodic activity as well as the distinctive timbre of the Sacred Harp alto voice, I have always found my ear drawn to the alto in this fugue above all the other parts. Although the new alto parts may not have always introduced thirds, the part might still add complexity to the harmony. W. R. McCoy’s alto for J. P. Rees’s “Never Turn Back” (example 4.7, p. 93)43 contributes a new and significant idea to the harmony, actually adding a bit of text painting rather than a complete triad. In mm. 7 and 14, the altos sing an F, turning what had been an open G chord into a thirdless G7. The new pitch, which does not create the undesirable impression of tertian
40 Wallace McKenzie, “The Alto Parts in the “True Dispersed Harmony” of “The Sacred Harp” Revisions,” The Musical Quarterly 73 no. 2 (1989), 164. 41 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 9. 42 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp (Dothan, AL.: W.M. Cooper & Co., 1902, Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas), 112. 43 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 381.
91 harmony at a crucial moment, instead adds a shimmering dissonance. This uneasy harmony falls on the word “back,” which, in combination with the existing rhythmic stress on the word “never,” emphasizes the singers’ commitment to heaven and suggests horror at rejecting it in favor of the earthly realm.
Other women 10% Miss Minnie Floyd W. M. 12% Cooper 42% Mrs. R. D. (Anna) Blackshear 22%
B. P. Other men Poyner 8% 6% Figure 4.4: Composers of alto lines in the 1902 Cooper Sacred Harp
Example 4.6: “The Last Words of Copernicus,” alto by Minnie Floyd
92
Example 4.7: “Never Turn Back,” alto by W. R. McCoy
Cooper also added a number of tunes in the early Southern gospel style. One unusual subset of such tunes, which I call the female duet, emphasizes the importance of women in early Cooper singing. In these tunes, sopranos and altos sing the verses in a duet texture, and then the customary four-part harmony resumes at the chorus. These tunes obviously highlight the voices of all the female singers and require the support of women with strong high and low registers. There was only one tune of this type in the first Cooper edition, “Carry Me Home” (example 4.8), but two more were added in 1907 and three more in 1909, suggesting that tunes featuring women’s voices were especially popular in early twentieth-century Cooper book singings.44
Example 4.8: “Carry Me Home”
The scarcity of alto parts in the nineteenth-century Sacred Harp reflects the fact that the American tunebook hymnody, like all music, was shaped by the needs and capacities of its users. In
44 Cooper, The Sacred Harp (1902), 386.
93 the eighteenth century, most of those users were singers in their teens and early to mid-twenties, and so the repertoire of singing schools and Yankee church choirs formed around them. As tunebook singing moved to the frontier, the age of its participants expanded to include older men, but it seems that adult women were still left out. With a sound that was probably dominated by adult male voices, composers likely stopped writing the counter because there just were not singers to support the part. When the alto line was added in the twentieth century, it represented the expanded role that adult women were playing in the new Sacred Harp singing cultures. The iconic four-sided hollow square is therefore the product of the voices of women, not only in the sound of the music but also in the shaping of the tradition.
94 CHAPTER 5
THE J. L. WHITE AND JAMES SACRED HARP EDITIONS: PROGRESSIVISM AND RETROSPECTION
Cooper observed that by the early twentieth century, the Sacred Harp had “come to seem almost like a sacred thing.”1 This did not mean that it was perfect, nor did it preclude the need for a revision. Singers in the Atlanta area, a Sacred Harp stronghold with deep ties to the White family, also looked for a new revision. They were hampered by deep disagreements about what this book should look like; how far from the antebellum homeland it should stray. Two Sacred Harp tunebook lines were ultimately established there, one by J. L. White and one by Joe S. James. These two men represented the opposite ends of the routine vs. retrospective spectrum: White was a reformer who wanted to update and modernize Sacred Harp singing, while James was a wellspring of nostalgia and seemed to value the book as a symbol almost as much as a text. These Atlanta area books also completed the dispersal of the Sacred Harp diaspora. The nostalgic approach to Sacred Harp history writing can be traced back to Joe S. James in turn of the century Atlanta. James published a booklet titled A Brief History of The Sacred Harp in 1904. This is the first known effort to document the history of Sacred Harp, and James is therefore the first Sacred Harp historian. In it, he referenced a “rapidly increasing revival [of the] use of the Sacred Harp in many sections of the country, and demand for it by a large number of music lovers in this and other states.”2 This revival probably dated back to at least 1897, when J. L. White reprinted his father’s fourth edition, and the Cooper book could have been part of a similar trend in southeastern Alabama. James’s history focused on the people involved in Sacred Harp singing: B. F. White, his descendants, other major composers, and leaders in the region, in the hopes that it might “…give some insight to the character, standing and unselfish purpose of the principal author and promoters of the music contained in the Sacred Harp.”3 Although he believed that it would also “…bring joy, comfort and sunshine to many old people…”4 it seems his primary hope was that the book would be “of much aid and assistance to those who may feel inclined to this system of song
1 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp (Dothan, AL.: W.M. Cooper & Co., 1902, courtesy of Texas State University Libraries), 9. 2 Joe S. James, A Brief History of the Sacred Harp and its author, B. F. White, Sr., and Contributors. (Douglasville, Ga.: New South Book and Job Print, 1904, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 4. He also emphases throughout the book that those involved in the development and dissemination of the Sacred Harp did not work for financial gain, likely a dig at gospel publishing houses. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 Ibid.
95 books…”5 presumably the new singers who had been brought into the fold during this revival. Full of nostalgic language and with an emphasis on telling the tales of its heroes, mostly dead and gone, James’s History is the first written mythology of Sacred Harp, and it is characteristic of his nostalgic and tradition-based vision for the future of Sacred Harp singing. Not all of James’s heroes were dead and gone. James included a sizeable entry on J. L. White, who was the youngest of the White sons and the one most active in the Atlanta area, a noted teacher and leader in his own right. James’s description of White is particularly warm, and one does sense the friendship between these two men. James outlined White’s education, which included many sessions at normal schools, and highlighted his continued support for his father’s book and antebellum styles despite his sympathy for seven shapes.
… He is one of the best posted musicians in the State, and has been engaged in teaching music ever since 1875. … His method of teaching is right up to date. He teaches his scholars to read and compose from the beginning, and gives them the first principles that govern music, and they are enabled to sing in any kind of notes, round or shape. He has composed a great deal of music, and finds no trouble in this work. He has a keen perception of melody and harmony, and at a glance can readily detect a defect in any composition in music. … He also composed the popular song book, “The New Sacred Harp,” in seven shaped notes. This music book has a large number of valuable and beautiful tunes. Several years ago he wrote all the tunes in the Sacred Harp into seven shape notes, but after doing so decided not to publish it, as he believed the Sacred Harp, as left by his father and the others who aided him, would be more beneficial in its present shape than to change its notation. … When questioned about writing the Sacred Harp in seven shape notes, correcting its errors and harmony, he said: “After I had gone through all and completed my work I decided not to disturb the old book but let it remain as the handiwork of my father and the other good men who had aided him and made the glorious old songs incorporated in the Sacred Harp.” … Prof. White says “that the present form of writing music has one leading melody only, and all the other parts lend to it, while under the arrangements of the Sacred Harp, it ignores this method, and each part is a complete melody in its self. The music in this book has stood the good test for over a half of a century, and it is just as good today as it was in the beginning. My experience is that no song book, taken as a whole, so stirs the hearts of the people as does the Sacred Harp.” … He is following in the footsteps of his father and has been greatly benefited by the precepts of Major. B. F. White. He is a jolly fellow and is a great favorite among the singing public and all who love good music. Everybody loves Jim White and he numbers his friends by the thousands.6
5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid., 41-5.
96 This friendship was not to last. The two became bitter rivals, and by 1911, James and J. L. White had competing Sacred Harp tunebooks. James published another pamphlet in 1920, his “Explanation of the Sacred Harp,” in which he highlighted the faults of the Cooper and especially J. L. White Sacred Harp revisions, and explained why his book was superior. James’s descriptions of White are not only unflattering but even contradict what he had said in 1904. For example:
If Mr. White was so in love with Sacred Harp music and About preserving it for future generations, why did he try to destroy it in 1879 [1884], by getting out what he called the “New Sacred Harp,” composed in seven shaped notes and a part of it composed of condensed or modern harmony and inserting tunes in that book suitable to this class of music, in trying to substitute this book for the Sacred Harp of 1869, he totally failed and his new Sacred Harp went dead. He quit the Sacred Harp, in 1869, and went all around teaching round notes and modern tune books and some of them composed in seven shaped notes. So far as he was concerned, the Sacred Harp was put out of use. He said that it was out of date and could not be used any more as a song book, that it was improperly composed and was a back number.7
Of course, White probably never intended to “destroy” the Sacred Harp, nor did he likely intend his slim New Sacred Harp as anything more than a supplement to the older, larger book. These contrasting depictions of White’s work illustrate the passion which James, and likely others, had for certain ideas about the Sacred Harp. To Atlanta area singers, the book and practice had become a symbol for one of two opposite trends within the New South movement: improving the present by making it as much like the past as possible with James, and improving the present by incorporating tradition with modern progressivism in the work of J. L. White. Since White’s book has now almost entirely fallen out of use and James’s book lives on to the present day in the Denson revision, it seems clear that James’s vision was ultimately the more successful. His tunebook was supported by his work as the first Sacred Harp historian and most prolific author about Sacred Harp of the day, based on surviving documents. As demonstrated above, though, James was not always the most reliable narrator, and so the history of this period, and of Sacred Harp generally, has long been viewed with the biases established in James’s Sacred Harp mythology.
7 Joe S. James, “Explanation of the Sacred Harp” (Printed by Gordon W. Donaldson, dated August 9, 1920, Atlanta, Ga.), 11.
97 The United Sacred Harp Musical Association and Revision Committee
Although there were active singing populations from Georgia to Florida to Texas, the Atlanta area was a major hub for the turn of the century Sacred Harp singing revival. B. F. White had originally settled well to the south but retired to DeKalb County, now roughly the eastern half of Atlanta, and J. L. White was a resident of Decatur, which is now an eastern Atlanta suburb.8 To the west, Joe S. James was a lifelong resident of Douglasville.9 Both men were founders of the United Sacred Harp Musical Association (USHMA), a major convention founded in 1904 or 1905 that met at the Tabernacle, a large, conservative Baptist church in the city of Atlanta.10 Gavin James Campbell noted that James hoped the USHMA would create uniformity within the tradition by drawing in singers from many communities to rally around a common style and ultimately Sacred Harp revision.11 Although the convention was intended to serve as a unifying hub for all the disparate Sacred Harp communities, George Pullen Jackson observed that in the minutes from 1914- 1922, the overwhelming majority of attendees were from Georgia.12 Still, the USHMA felt that they had the authority to produce a proper revision to the Sacred Harp, and appointed a committee to develop this new revision in 1906. After three years, J. L. White went rogue, releasing three Sacred Harp revisions between 1909 and 1911. Ultimately, the USHMA adopted the James book in 1911, and White and his followers walked out.13
J. L. White’s Sacred Harp Revisions
In his “Explanation,” James said that when White released his first Sacred Harp in 1909, he failed to submit his book to the USHMA revision committee as he was supposed to.14 He goes on to say that White repeatedly tried to ignore urging from the committee to revise his book and make it
8 David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 165, 167. 9 Ibid., 126. 10 Ibid., 126, 167. Some sources (i.e. Cobb, Vinson, Campbell) list the founding as 1904, while Steel lists it as 1905. According to Vinson, the convention grew out of a Sacred Harp singing at the conclusion of a 1904 summer revival at the Tabernacle church. It met as an independent convention in the fall of 1905, and continued to be a fall convention after that time. The year of the founding therefore depends on whether or not one counts the revival as a part of the convention. (Vinson, 428-9) 11 Gavin James Campbell, “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New’: Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South, 1880-1920” (The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 110, No. 436, pp. 169-188), 182. 12 George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1965, reprinted from original by University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 103. 13 Campbell, “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New,’” 185. 14 One of the very few concise and correctly constructed sentences in the entire document appears in this section, regarding White’s failure to submit his 1909 book to the committee: “He did not do this.” The effect is like a sforzando on White’s negligence, although given that James was not a tremendously sophisticated writer, he may not have created this tone with conscious intent.
98 more like the fourth edition, and he only grudgingly made changes. Ultimately, the committee threatened to revise the Sacred Harp themselves if White did not comply with their requests, but White, “said it should stand just as he had prepared it.”15 He makes it sound as though White was acting totally independently of a unified and organized authority. White told a different story in an “Explanation” in the front matter of his 1909 Sacred Harp:
A Committee was appointed by the United Sacred Harp Musical Association to confer with the White heirs, looking to a revision of the HARP, but their plans having failed to materialize and mature, and having given said Committee TWO YEARS to formulate same, and the Chairman of said Committee having released all claims thereto; and believing it justice to the singing public that a revision be made as speedy as practicable, the Compiler, through the aid of Southeast Alabama friends and others have formulated plans and have revised the book.
If the USHMA committee was formed in 1906 and was not close to producing a book in 1909, then it does seem plausible that they were having difficulty in producing a revision, either because they were not sufficiently motivated to the task or because they could not come to a consensus as to the contents and style of the book. Given the differences of style between the White and James books, it seems likely that differences of opinion regarding the style of the new revision stalled this committee, and ultimately led to White’s departure. Since the James committee did not release a book for another three years, White may not have been the only dissenting voice. White also mentioned that he worked with “Southeast Alabama friends and others,” which would suggest that he did consult with a new committee, although the members of his committee may not have been members of the USHMA. If James had never met White’s closest collaborators, then to him it may have seemed that White’s ideas were formed independent of other Sacred Harp singers. Although J. L. White held the copyright for all three books and called himself the compiler in other front matter, on the committee page he is listed as the “Manager,” a position not found in other revision committees. His name appears after those of the committee chairman, Dr. C. M. White, and two vice chairmen, Jasper Barnes and J. R. Smith, which would suggest a much less senior position.16 It is possible that White anticipated his book would meet with resistance, and by placing his name further down the page he meant to downplay his own influence on the book,
15 James, “Explanation of the Sacred Harp,” 5. 16 It is not clear whom C. M. White might be; B. F. White had no sons with those initials, and there are no C. M. Whites in any discussions of the White family I have read. He could be a cousin, or an unrelated White.
99 suggesting that he was only one of many who supported these new ideas. As for the rest of the committee, T. W. Loftin was the secretary-treasurer, and there were twenty-nine regular committee members: M. L. Runnels, W. A. Helms, J. N. Dykes, J. J. Wright, H. Faust, W. R. McCoy, Z. E. Blocker, W. A Robinett, W. A. Carter, J. B. Sheppard, E. L. Sheppard, Gennie Harden, O. A. Jackson, Buck Helms, T. H. Loftin, L. M. Creel, W. J. Stuart, M. F. McWhorter, S. M. Denson, T. J. Denson, H. S. Reese, A. Ogletree, J. R. Hopkins, R. E. Ray, G. W. Ferguson, J. A. Buchanan, R. J. Robbins, and A. R. Walton. The name “Gennie Harden” is of note; if Gennie was a woman, then she was the first to serve on a revision committee. White indicates in each revision that he worked with singers from south Alabama, and sometimes includes northern Florida, even though the committee membership never changes. Some of those listed had experience on Sacred Harp revision committees: T. W. Loftin, W. R. McCoy, and W. A. Robinett all served on Cooper’s revision committee in 1902.17 That committee also included a J. F. Helms, who could perhaps be related to W. A. and Buck Helms in White’s committee. Loftin and Robinett were not listed in Cooper’s committee in 1909, suggesting that they may have switched allegiances to J. L. White. Loftin is also the composer of a number of tunes in White’s books, and in the introduction to his 1910 book, White thanked Loftin specifically for his indispensable assistance. W. R. McCoy continued to serve on Cooper’s committee.18 Four of White’s committee members, A. Ogletree, M. F. McWhorter, and S. M. and T. J. Denson, later appear in the committee for the James book. Given that this very large list of committee members is reprinted with each of White’s three books, the extent of the committee’s role in the actual preparation of each book is questionable, especially after 1909 when White was turning them out so quickly. Since White particularly thanked Loftin in 1910, he might have consulted the full committee for the 1909 book and then relied on those closest to him for the others. There is also some question as to whether all those listed actually served on the committee; James later claimed that some on his committee were listed on White’s, implying their approval of his book, which they had never given.19 Even though James’s remarks about White’s revisions cannot always be taken at face value, the fact that some individuals appear
17 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp (Dothan, AL.: W.M. Cooper & Co., 1902, courtesy of Texas State University Libraries), 1902. 18 W. M. Cooper, The Sacred Harp (Dothan, AL: Distributed by B. P. Poyner, 1909, courtesy of Appalachian State University). W. M. Cooper, attr., The Sacred Harp (Panama City, FL: owned and published by Dr. R. D. Blackshear, 1927, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.). 19 Joe S. James, The Original Sacred Harp (Atlanta, 1911, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.).
100 on both committees does suggest that White may not have been totally honest about who supported his book. White listed James’s committee appointed by the USHMA in his 1910 book. This list is nearly identical to the one printed in James’s book in 1911; perhaps this was the original committee from 1906, or the committee as it stood as of 1910. The headings for each committee suggest that although White recognized that James’s committee had the authority of the USHMA, he wanted to drive home that the more “official” committee had not produced results. White did not list James’s committee in his 1911 book, likely because their competing book’s release was imminent and White could no longer trumpet the other committee’s failure to act. White also wrote his own rudiments section, which he included in all three books, sometimes in tandem with his father’s rudiments and sometimes as the only pedagogical material in the book. The most noteworthy addition to these rudiments is the “Hints on How to Write Music,” which includes discussion of concepts of functional harmony: triads and inversions, progressions and resolutions, modulations, phrase structure, and some basic tips for part writing such as avoiding parallel fifths and octaves and striving to keep each voice part as smooth as possible. This section is a clear sign of the influence of European ideas, filtered through Northern musical reforms, and disseminated through the normal schools where White was trained. All three of White’s books draw from the same pool of tunes, old and new, but in different arrangements and in different proportions. This is likely how White was able to produce his second and third books so quickly. Of course, as in other revisions, the Fourth Edition served as the core. Most of these tunes appeared without alto parts, as White instead chose to re-use his father’s old plates. Perhaps the alto part was not a priority for White, or the advantages of reusing old plates outweighed their importance. When White does add alto parts to three-part tunes, he generally alters the treble as well, and sometimes the bass. These tunes are re-arranged to more closely resemble the Northern reform style. Compare the original version of “Idumea” (example 5.1) with J. L. White’s arrangement (example 5.2) that appears in the 1909 and 1910 books. The new arrangement incorporates some ideas and stylistic values from functional harmony while also preserving some elements of the original. There is a new alto line, which includes two raised seventh scale degrees. There are a few small changes to the bass, but the treble line has been overhauled to be lower and in a more confined range. Despite these changes, the chord progressions are still not ideal for functional harmony, and there is no leading tone in the final cadence.
101
Example 5.1: “Idumea,” fourth edition
Example 5.2: “Idumea,” 1909 fifth edition
“Amazing Grace” (see example 5.3 and 5.4, p. 103) was also heavily revised, with many alterations in all parts except for the tenor melody. For the most part, the harmonies are more static,
! although there are some adventures in passing ! chords, such as in m. 3 on “grace,” as well as a few chords with no thirds, most significantly the V7 chord in the final cadence. Many of J. L. White’s new tunes are in the Northern reform style, with Lowell Mason and Thomas Hastings well represented. Tunes drawn from Mozart and Rossini add a touch of European sophistication. There are also a number of gospel songs, including some by J. L. White himself. Although antebellum styles are still present in the book in the form of the old, unaltered tunes from the Fourth Edition, there are few such tunes among those added to White’s revisions, and those are often drawn from older sources rather than White’s contemporaries. For example, there are only three new fuging tunes in the 1910 book: “Geneva,” “Rainbow,” and “Raymond.” The first, “Geneva,” is an arrangement of a fuging tune of the same name in John Cole’s 1829 Union Harmony. “Raymond” is from John G. McCurry’s 1855 Social Harp, and “Rainbow” is by the eighteenth- century tunesmith Timothy Swan. Although the older styles must have still been important to White and his supporters, there evidently was not much interest in composing in these styles in White’s circle.
102
Example 5.3: “New Britain,” fourth edition
Example 5.4: “New Britain,” 1909 fifth edition
Since he was reusing tunes, J. L. White also reused plates. Many of the older tunes from the Fourth Edition were printed with the original plates, which White must have still had from the reprints. For example, compare page 33 in the 1897 Fourth Edition reprint (see example 5.5, p. 104) and in the “old” section of J. L. White’s 1909 Fifth Edition (see example 5.6, p. 104).20 The fonts of both the text and musical notation match, as do the gap in the tenor staff in the third phrase of “Weeping Savior” and at the bottom of the bass staff throughout “Abbeville.” When tunes were relocated, White still used his father’s plates and changed only the page number (see example 5.7, p. 105, and example 5.8, p. 106).21
20 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 33. J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (1909), 33 old. 21 White and King, The Sacred Harp, 368. J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (1909), 37 old.
103
Example 5.5: “Weeping Savior” and “Abbeville,” fourth edition
Example 5.6: “Weeping Savior” and “Abbeville,” 1909 fifth edition
Use of his father’s plates certainly would have reduced the cost and expedited the printing process for each of the J. L. White’s books, and may also have served as a visual signifier of White’s authority as heir to his father’s legacy. As a trade-off, these tunes could not have alto parts added. The new plates are easily distinguishable from the old ones, since the print quality is much higher and both text and music fonts are noticeably different. As he re-arranged the different revisions, White sometimes subbed in new plates with new arrangements of old tunes, so new plates appear
104 alongside old ones in the 1910 and 1911 editions. In the 1911 edition, some plates are in a third style, with line breaks suggesting single-impression printing with moveable type. These tunes are old tunes in the original, nineteenth-century arrangements that appear on the same page as a new tune that White decided to keep. White must not have been able to combine his father’s old engraved plates with his new ones, so resetting the old tune in moveable type must have been the fastest and cheapest way to typeset the page. The tune “Windham” illustrates all three of these styles. In the 1909 book, it first appears with the original nineteenth century plate (see example 5.9, p. 106),22 but then it is also included in the second part of the book in a new arrangement, where it shared the page with a new tune, “New York Tune.” White used the second, new arrangement of the tune in his 1910 book (see example 5.10, p. 107) and used the full new plate, replacing “Winter” with “New York Tune.”23 In 1911, White used the single-impression print to restore the original Windham (although he did print the alto with a G clef instead of C clef), but retained “New York Tune” above it (see example 5.11, p. 107).24
Example 5.7: “Remember Me” and “Newman,” fourth edition
22 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (1909), 38. 23 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp, fifth edition (Atlanta, 1910, courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University), 38. 24 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp, fourth edition, with supplement (Atlanta, 1911, courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University), 38.
105
Example 5.8: “Remember Me” and “Newman,” 1909 fifth edition
Example 5.9: Page 38, nineteenth-century engraved plate
106
Example 5.10: Page 38, new engraved plate
Example 5.11: Page 38, new plate, half engraved and half moveable type
107 Although all three of White’s books draw from the same body of tunes, the arrangement of the tunes does change, as does the ratio of old to new tunes. The structure and stylistic priorities of the books evolve from the 1909 book, which is really two books under the same cover, to the 1911 book, where he abandoned the title “Fifth Edition” entirely. J. L. White called his 1909 book the Fifth Edition; the cover advertised it as “Fifth Edition, Much Improved and Greatly Enlarged,” as well as “Fifth Edition Entirely Remodeled and Improved.” White was the only compiler to claim the title “Fifth Edition,” which simultaneously establishes his work as the continuation of his father’s while also indicating that he is continuing to develop the book as his father did, rather than holding firmly to the past. The book is actually two books in one, and it is particularly frustrating that he did not include any kind of an introduction explaining the reasoning behind the book’s odd structure. The first 308 pages of the book contain the nineteenth-century rudiments and selections from the Sacred Harp fourth edition. Although this represents a significant portion of the elder White’s final book, the 1909 fifth edition does not include all 477 of the original fourth edition pages, and some tunes are shuffled to fill the gaps left by the cuts. The fourth edition plates are used exclusively in this section, and these pages are described as “old” in the index. After page 308, the numbering starts over again, beginning with page 5. This is the “new” section of the book, which starts with the updated rudiments section and includes both new tunes as well as the new arrangements of old tunes. Since the numbering re-starts and some tunes appear in both the old and new sections of the book, the book’s index has two columns for page numbers, indicating the “old” and “new” halves (see figure 5.1, p. 109). Because of this curious approach to numbering pages and ordering the book, the 1909 Fifth Edition must have been a confusing book to use, since singers traditionally request tunes by their page numbers. For example, if a leader wanted to call “Holy Manna” in B. F. White’s fourth edition, he would request the page number, 59, which he probably memorized long ago. In J. L. White’s book, he would now have to specify if he wanted “old 59” or “new 59,” which has a revised version of “Holy Manna.” Even more confusing, if he wanted to sing “Villulia,” instead of calling 331 bottom, he would have to find its new home on old 242 bottom. And if he wanted to sing “Boylston” as it appeared at the top of page 447 in B. F. White’s fourth edition, he would have to switch back to the old book, because in J. L. White’s 1909 revision, “Boylston” only appears in a revised form at the top of new 84. It is not difficult to imagine why the 1909 book would have been unpopular.
108
Figure 5.1: 1909 General Index
White immediately changed course, and the structure of his next book more closely resembled that of the Cooper revisions. White also called this book a fifth edition, even though it is clearly a different book from the 1909 Fifth Edition. This too can be a source of confusion; in his book The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its Music, Buell Cobb actually conflates the two books, describing the two-part structure of the 1909 Fifth Edition but the front matter of the 1910 Fifth Edition.25 Cobb likely had not seen either book himself and was relying on secondhand descriptions of J. L. White’s “Fifth Edition.” The 1910 book is the only one with a substantial preface. Citing “an almost universal demand for a revision,” White attempted to make this second of his eventual three books “in such a way as not to destroy the identity of our honored father’s work.” He highlighted five points:
1. we have let the body of the work remain unchanged, where practicle [sic] retaining old name and page. 2. to preserve and maintain the old harmonies, adding more poetry where practicable and correcting errors in harmony, as well as typographical errors.
25 Cobb, The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and its Music, 98-9.
109 3. in compiling and arranging the Fifth Edition, we have added a number of songs never before published, which were arranged expressly for this edition, and conform to the modern rules and laws governing harmony and composition. 4. we have endeavored to supply a long felt need for a higher class of religious music, that will appeal to the hearts of the singing public, and supplant an element of so called music, placing in its stead, a high class of vocal collections suitable for all Church and Religious worship. 5. we have compiled and arranged for the Fifth Edition a plain and simple theory, with rules for learning, together with lessons in practical harmony and composition, with rules governing the study of the same, for the Singing School Department.
The first item on the list corrects the mistake of White’s previous fifth edition: the structure of the book is the same as in the nineteenth-century book, with much less tune shuffling. The second point is much like one of the aims of the Cooper revision. In the fifth point, we learn that J. L. White abandoned his father’s rudiments in this edition in favor of his own. Since this book did not have the “old” and “new” sections of the previous one, it would not make sense to include both rudiments, and the younger White must have felt that his own updated rudiments were better suited for the young musicians of the day. Since he likely used this book when teaching his singing schools, it also makes sense that he would prefer his own pedagogical approach. The third and fourth points show J. L. White’s stylistic preferences that make his book unique within the Sacred Harp canon: again we see references to “modern rules and laws governing harmony” and “a higher class of religious music,” language associated with the Northern-influenced seven-shape books. This book is more in line with standard Sacred Harp revision practice: some new tunes are swapped out for the old, and there is a generous appendix with new tunes. In many instances, White used his new arrangements of old tunes, and therefore the new plates from the 1909 book instead of the nineteenth-century plates. This added a few new tunes to the old section. Although B. F. White did not replace plates as his son did, the end result of the approach in the 1910 book is a structure exactly like that of the elder White’s Fourth Edition. The practice of replacing the plates may have somewhat altered how and why tunes were cut, however. In the examples given previously, “New York Tune” must have been sufficiently valuable to make the final cut in 1911, but White’s plate swapping suggests that printing convenience might have been a factor in his decision to cut tunes, rather than relying on tune popularity as other compilers had done. This more moderate approach would seem to be more acceptable, but White changed his approach again in advance of James’s book, releasing a third and final edition in 1911. The book would be reprinted for a time, but he would make no further major revisions. White must have been
110 under continued pressure to adopt a more conservative approach, as he abandoned the title “Fifth Edition” and instead called the book “Fourth Edition, with Supplement.” The brief, perhaps even terse preface suggests both the kind of pressure White faced as well as his frustration.
There being such a universal demand for the old fourth edition and it being my wish to perpetuate the music as written by my father and the dear brethren associated with him, I herewith submit for your approval the fourth edition, with supplement. The Singing School Department on the last twenty-six pages I recommend to all teachers and students of music.26
Although the preface suggests that the fourth edition has been reprinted verbatim, White kept some of his new plates and new tunes in the older sections. The structure of the book is really not different from that of the 1910 Fifth Edition; White simply restored more of his father’s plates and moved most of the new tunes as well as his own rudiments to the appendix. Still, that White used the title “Fourth Edition with Supplement” is significant. It seems like an overstatement, since the differences between the 1870 and 1911 books should still be enough to qualify the latter as a revision of the former. The title was likely meant to draw back in those who were the most conservative, perhaps even to get an edge on the market for singers who were so conservative that they would prefer another fourth edition reprint. The modern hymn tunes and gospel songs as well as the inclusion of both versions of the rudiments might perhaps reveal a final hope to advance the styles that White felt were the future. Maybe he thought that if he included them with the beloved old hymns, some singers might eventually learn to love them, too. It is possible that J. L. White himself might not have really been a part of the Sacred Harp diaspora. Although he retained some key elements of the older style, he also actively sought to update the book and bring it more in line with the more modern practices of the time. Perhaps, if one gives credence to James’s claim that J. L. White sought to destroy the Sacred Harp, the White books were intended as gateways to gently lead singers out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Philosophically, White might be better represented as an immigrant, a label Safran and others would use to describe a migrant who travels to the hostland and seeks to assimilate with the new culture, preserving perhaps a few elements of the old homeland while participating as a full member of the new society. Still, each successive tunebook became less progressive as the fundamentally diasporic singing population rejected excessive assimilation.
26 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (1911), 2.
111 The Original Sacred Harp
Whereas J. L. White’s books take a more progressive approach, Joe S. James’s 1911 Original Sacred Harp is firmly rooted in the past. The use of “Original” in the title emphasizes that, in James’s view, his book was the only book available that was true to the nineteenth-century works of B. F. White. Unlike Cooper and J. L. White, James did not cut any tunes from the fourth edition. His “new appendix” contains some newly composed tunes, which he emphasized were in the “dispersed harmony” style of the older antebellum tunes. About half of his “new” tunes were not new at all, but older tunes that B. F. White had cut from earlier Sacred Harp editions as well as antebellum tunes from other sources. The appendix opens with a tunesmith tune, Billings’s “Chester,” which at the time was almost 150 years old. Of course, these tunes are inarguably authentic in their antebellum style, but this choice also reflects the importance in James’s mind of the whole nineteenth-century tradition. B. F. White cut these tunes as his tunebook evolved, because it was a dynamic work and these tunes must have had less value to his singers. The re-introduction of these tunes suggests that although James was certainly well aware of the history of Sacred Harp revisions, his concept of the antebellum practice was more static. The nineteenth-century Sacred Harp repertoire existed for James as a sacred text in four parts, one that he sought to unify into a single book. All the tunes were valuable because they came from the noble past. Ultimately, some of the re-introduced tunes proved to have value for many singers in the new century and are still popular tunes in this one, but many were re-cut in later editions. James continued his historical work through his tunebooks. In 1909, James published a tunebook called The Union Harp and History of Songs, which included brief historical statements on the composer, poet, and original source for each tune, as best as he could determine them. James followed this model and added similar histories to every tune in his 1911 Original Sacred Harp, nominally to enhance the singer’s understanding and appreciation of the tune. Of course, this historical background also serves to establish a mythology of authors and composers past and present, and by adding it to the Sacred Harp tunebook itself he ensured that these stories were literally in the hands of every Sacred Harp singer who used his book. Even the rudiments place Sacred Harp singing in the context of a long historical tradition; James offers “gamut” as a synonym for scale (page 3), includes the names for the different scale degrees as part of a lesson on the tetrachords of “the ancients” (page 11), and his discussion of solfège begins with the ancient Greeks, continues to Guido, and includes a French four-syllable system and a seven-syllable system used by C. H. Graun, among others (page 15-16). Although his
112 connections are ill-defined, each citation serves to tie Sacred Harp singing to much older musical practices. Of course, they also serve to illustrate the breadth of James’s knowledge. The glossary includes many terms that would not be useful for students of Sacred Harp singing such as motet, fanfare, etude, aria, nocturne, oratorio, overture, prelude, gallop, and Mass. Most of these ideas help to place Sacred Harp singing in the context of a much longer, if also much more broad, Euro- Christian tradition.27 Of course, he also might have included these ideas out of a desire to share as much information as possible with his students, or perhaps to compensate for any insecurities he may have had about his qualifications as compared to J. L. White, who was a White family heir and had a much more thorough musical education. Despite the very self-conscious effort to tie the book to the past, it was very much a product of James’s present. In his article “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New’: Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South, 1880-1920,” Gavin James Campbell highlighted the ways in which the James revision also reflects a number of New South attitudes, revitalizing an old tradition that is considered valuable in order to improve the present in connection with a simultaneous religious revivalism.28 James’s fascination with history is also a reflection of modernity, as this kind of historiography and mythologizing is much less prevalent in nineteenth-century books. The Original Sacred Harp was also designed to better document its own history, with individual photographs of the entire revision committee and others important supporters of the book, as well as extensive front matter documenting what was done, and not done, and why. Campbell and others have already discussed this material in detail, eliminating the need for such an examination here. Since James was generally concerned with stylistic purity and many of his new tunes are, in fact, old tunes, there is also little need for examples. The following chapter, however, will examine how James and others approached the revision of a problematic older tune, “Boylston,”
27 Denson book singers continue to incorporate Guido in their pedagogy. The documentary Awake My Soul, written and directed by two Atlanta singers and very much a product of the Denson community, includes a brief discussion of Guido d’Arezzo and a performance of most of the first verse of the hymn Ut queant laxis, much of which was filmed at a singing school. The Guido section occurs during an explanation of solfège, and while the Guidonian system is certainly relevant to such a discussion, it is not necessary to know about hexachords to understand the practical use and function of four or seven-syllable solfège. Since the film jumps directly from Guido to Billings with no information about how the four-syllable system was developed, this discussion of Guido has no historical context to directly connect it to Sacred Harp. Instead, a connection to medieval practice serves to reinforce the idea that this music has very strong ties to the past. Guido is so important to the directors’ idea of the central Sacred Harp narrative that they make time for him, but not for any mention of the other twentieth-century revisions or the Cooper book singing practice. 28 Gavin James Campbell, “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New’: Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South, 1880-1920” (The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 110, No. 436 (Spring, 1997), 169-188.
113 demonstrating that James’s stylistic values were not always so pure as he claimed.29 James also included one tune by a man he called “one of the great masters” (example 5.12),30 a melody that most certainly did not have origins in dispersed harmony, and in a setting adapted from the one commonly used in mainstream denominational hymnals.31
Example 5.12: “Mendelssohn,” Original Sacred Harp
Conflict Between Revisions
J. L. White’s rogue revisions and eventual departure from the USHMA had already established animosity between himself and James, and Cooper entered the fray soon after the
29 A degree of inconsistency is a normal human trait, although in James’s case it might also be a reflection of his relatively unsophisticated musical education; he might not have always recognized the style elements to which he was philosophically opposed. 30 Joe S. James, The Original Sacred Harp (Atlanta, 1911, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 197. James’s historical statement on the hymn and tune has been included. He lists the tune’s source as “J. L. F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s cantata;” more specifically he means Mendelssohn’s Festgesang zum Gutenbergfest. 31 The Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1935), 86.
114 publication of the James edition. We do not know what Cooper and J. L. White thought of each other’s books. It is possible that Cooper may have resented White for apparently drawing away some of his own supporters, but there is no known documentation of any rivalry between them. We do know, however, that Cooper responded very negatively to at least one element of James’s book: the alto parts. As discussed previously, Cooper was the first publisher to add alto parts to all three-part tunes; these parts were added in response to singer demand and usually the other parts were left unaltered. Since J. L. White’s twentieth century books relied in part on his father’s plates, his books still contained a fair number of three-part tunes. When White did alter a tune from his father’s book, he usually re-arranged the treble and bass parts in addition to adding an alto, often altering the harmonic language in the process. Like Cooper, James added altos to most, though not all, three- part tunes, only to those which could be “improved” by the addition of an alto, as all the alto parts were composed “in such a way as to greatly improve the melody of each and all the tunes.” Furthermore, James stated that, “These, alto [sic] are unlike those other books.”32 James credited all the altos to S. M. Denson, although there has been some speculation that T. J. Denson’s wife, Amanda, who sang alto, may have been the actual composer of many of the original lines.33 This was not James’s only misattribution, however, as a large number of the new alto lines in his book are identical to those in the Cooper revision. In response, Cooper sued James for copyright violation.
Cooper lost the court case, but not because the court ruled that James had not stolen his alto lines; the judge acknowledged that, “Although denied in an answer filed in the case, it is necessary, perhaps, as the case is now heard, to assume that the altos used in James’s book… are substantially the same as in Cooper’s book…” Instead, the court ruled that the alto lines were “…not necessarily the productions of persons having the gift of originality in the composition of music. … In patents we say that any improvement which a good mechanic could make is not the subject of a patent, so in music it may be said that anything which a fairly good musician can make, the same tune being preserved, could not be the subject of a copyright.”34 Thus, James won the case because even though the judge recognized that James might have stolen Cooper’s alto lines, they were determined
32 James, Original Sacred Harp, v. 33 David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2010), 105-6. 34 Opinion by District Judge Newman, Cooper v. James 213 F. 871 (D.C. N.D. Ga., 1914). Music Copyright Infringement Resource – Sponsored by USC Gould School of Law
115 to be insufficiently sophisticated to merit copyright protection. This ruling must have been devastating for Cooper, as the alto lines he had so conscientiously attributed to each composer in his own book could now legally be ascribed to someone else.35 The court case is Cooper’s only known response to another Sacred Harp revision, and he died only a couple of years later. James in turn attempted to sue J. L. White for violating his copyright, but his suit was also unsuccessful.36 The conflict continued between James and White for some years, although precious little ephemera from the period have survived. J. L. White evidently published some circular letters denouncing James’s work, but there are no known extant copies. In response to these letters, James published the pamphlet “An Explanation of the Sacred Harp Printed and Published by B. F. White and E. J. King in 1844,” and copies of this very colorful document have survived.37 The pamphlet is sort of a history of the various Sacred Harp revisions, but the primary purpose is to tear down the Cooper revision and particularly to denounce J. L. White. Whereas James had politely hinted at issues such as the harmonies of other Sacred Harp revisions in his Sacred Harp front matter, here he laid them all out. James made fairly quick work of the Cooper book, with which he had three primary issues: that the harmonies were not always in dispersed harmony, that old tunes were removed, and that Cooper had no business revising B. F. White’s Sacred Harp in the first place. It is indisputable that Cooper removed some older tunes, just as B. F. White had done in previous revisions. James makes a point of emphasizing their age, though, saying that some had been in use for “centuries,” an overstatement for the vast majority of the oblong tunebook repertoire.38 The rest of James’s arguments also tend to not let facts get in the way of his opinions. James claimed that Cooper lost his court case because, “his pretended copyright entered on each one of his books, was held by the court in that case, not to be valid enough to be infringed upon.”39 James claims that Cooper’s copyright was invalid, which was not true. He also points out that the book is not entirely in
35 Although all subsequent Cooper books continued to credit the composers of the 1902 alto lines, their work is still uncredited where it appears in the 1991 Denson edition. 36 Jesse P. Karlsberg, ed, The Original Sacred Harp: Centennial Edition (Atlanta and Carrollton, GA: Pitts Theology Library and The Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 2015), xii. 37 The “Explanation” is hard to find, although others working in Sacred Harp history are familiar with its contents and I have no reason to question its authenticity. I heard about it from Robert Vaughn, who asked if I had seen it. He provided me with a copy of the copy he made from a copy borrowed from someone else that had been made from the original, which he had been told came from the Sacred Harp Museum in Carrollton, Georgia. When I visited Carrollton for research, the “Explanation” was not listed in the museum’s inventory; it seems to have gone missing from their collection. 38 James, “Explanation,” 3. 39 Ibid.
116 dispersed harmony, which is true, but he notes that the altos are of particular concern, as they are often either not in dispersed harmony or are so riddled with harmonic errors as to be “almost entirely without harmony, either modern or dispersed.”40 That the Cooper books were not particularly well edited is also a valid criticism, but James fails to mention that many of those inferior alto parts are also used in his own book. The overall tone is largely dismissive. James’s criticisms of J. L. White go on much longer. He accuses White of repeatedly trying to drag Sacred Harp singing into a modern style that singers repeatedly rejected, with White suddenly backpedalling to try to meet the demands of singers only in instances where he risks losing influence. Of course, some of this information directly contradicts information in his 1904 history, but that was how the 1890s looked from 1904. James’s discussion of White is spiteful, and White seems to embody both the proverbial pride and fall. The combativeness does not seem to have been limited to James. The “Explanation” was written in response to White’s circulars, after all, and James quotes from one:
“Dear Sir and Brother:” You know the B. F. White’s Sacred Harp published and written by my father, B. F. White, many, many years before you or I were born.” “For your information, the old B. F. White Sacred Harp song book is the only, original, bona fide book of sacred songs, and any book on the market claiming to be a Sacred Harp, is a cheat and an infringement on my copyright, put out by unscrupulous men solely for the purpose of pecuniary gain.” “Now, brother, won’t wou [sic] help me in my fight against these imposters and at the same time enjoy real music in your home and church?”41
It is unfortunate that these circulars have been lost, as we do not know if White commonly criticized James for copyright violations (the charge James leveled against Cooper and White) and publishing sacred song for financial gain (James’s implied criticism of gospel publishing houses in 1904). Based on this one sample, White was also no longer promoting his book on the merits of the more progressive elements that make it different from other Sacred Harp revisions, but was also emphasizing his book’s ties to B. F. White and the past. Did White have other arguments, or has James selected to respond to the charges that seemed most familiar and perhaps stung more as a result? Another old proverb tells us that history is written by the winners. The James/Denson tunebooks eventually outcompeted the White books in Georgia, and so in that way it makes sense
40 Ibid., 4. 41 Ibid., 8.
117 that so much of our understanding of early Sacred Harp history has come, for better or worse, from Joe James. Given the nature of The Sacred Harp within this culture, it is not surprising that the more tradition-based approach would win. White’s progressive approach to the Sacred Harp did not really provide singers with much that could not be had from other competing books, such as the Christian Harmony, which could easily be adopted or used to supplement the singing practices of interested parties. Cooper’s pastiche of old and new worked because it was not an intentional attempt to modernize the style, as in White, but rather was probably a reflection of the music that the singers routinely used anyway. The gospel hybrids and south-Alabama-specific tunes gave it unique elements not found in other books. The appeal of Sacred Harp singing for new singers most likely lay in its age, and so James’s nostalgia-based approach would make more sense for them. It also likely served to establish the most strongly diasporic attitudes found among Sacred Harp singers to the present day. James developed a mythos of Sacred Harp—not to say that it is not true, although facts were sometimes fudged, but rather that he gave it an origin story, with a cast of noble heroes, moral lessons, and even a villain whose progressivism threatened to destroy the noble truths of the “ancient” tradition.
118 CHAPTER 6
CASE STUDY: THE MANY REVISIONS OF “BOYLSTON”
When asked about the less common Cooper book, many Denson book singers will dismiss it with some variation of the slur “less traditional.” Traditionalism is the byword for many Sacred Harp singers, and Buell Cobb, in what remains the most complete standard work on Sacred Harp history, awards the Denson edition with the distinction of being the most traditional Sacred Harp in current use.1 One might note, however that the most traditional Sacred Harps of all, the four editions published by B. F. White between 1844 and 1870, are no longer in use. When W. M. Cooper published his first book in 1902, it was a revision of B. F. White’s final Sacred Harp edition. Books published by B. F. White’s youngest son, J. L. White, also attempted to revise the elder White’s work, although even the younger White’s most successful book was eventually out-competed by the Denson revision. The book published by S. M. and T. J. Denson in 1936 was not a direct revision of the nineteenth-century Sacred Harp, but rather a revision of another revision published in 1911 by Joe S. James. The Denson book has come to dominate most Sacred Harp singing, and from James forward its proponents have asserted that the James/Denson book is, essentially, the most traditional, the most correct in style. James’s labeling of the Cooper book as “less traditional” because it contains more “modern” harmony and a few Southern gospel tunes, as evident from Cobb’s attitude, has persisted for quite some time. James likewise dismissed J. L. White’s work as a “pretended revision” with a lengthy list of sins, among them the addition of tunes in unacceptable modern styles.2 I would contend that the question of which book is most traditional is more complex than some may realize. Different versions of “Boylston,” a simple plain tune originally written by the Euro-centric composer and reformer Lowell Mason, will be used as a case study to problematize the idea of “tradition” in Sacred Harp editions after the Civil War. The version of “Boylston” that B. F. White published in 1870 is somewhat atypical in the context of the earlier antebellum Southern tunebook styles. Cooper, J. L. White, and James also each published at least one unique arrangement of the
1 Buell E. Cobb, Jr., The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989), 110. 2 Joe S. James, “An Explanation of the Sacred Harp Printed and Published by B. F. White and E. J. King in 1844” (Atlanta, August 9, 1920, courtesy of Robert L. Vaughan, Mt. Enterprise, Texas), 4.
119 tune. Examination of these variants of “Boylston” serves to illustrate just how “traditional” the approach of each editor may have been in revising this stylistically problematic standard. Lowell Mason composed “Boylston” in 1832, and it was published three years later in his book The Choir or Union Collection of Church Music.3 “Boylston” first appeared in The Sacred Harp in 1870 as part of the fourth and final edition released during B. F. White’s lifetime. Like many tunes of Northern origin, someone revised “Boylston” before it was printed in The Sacred Harp. White’s source for the tune is unclear, and I have been unable to determine who completed the revision.4 White probably did not receive the tune directly from Mason’s book, as Mason is not listed as Boylston’s composer in The Sacred Harp. The source is listed as “from Pilsbury.” Although there was an earlier tunebook publisher in Charleston, South Carolina named Amos Pilsbury, his tunebook The United States’ Sacred Harmony was published in 1799.5 Without knowing White’s source for the tune, it is impossible to know who might have changed what as it worked its way to the Sacred Harp. Still, no matter who revised the tune, B. F. White enshrined this version of “Boylston” in the Sacred Harp canon by printing it in his book. Curiously, this revision of “Boylston” does not follow the norms for Southern revisions. George Pullen Jackson first described how many Northern tunes were “southernized”6 before being printed in Southern tunebooks. When a tune is southernized, the tenor line is usually unaltered, but other voices are edited as needed to become more melodically interesting. As Jackson wryly notes, “What violence such changes may have done to the harmony seems to have been looked upon as a secondary matter.”7 Of course, this is because harmony was of secondary concern in the Southern antebellum tunebook style. Often called “dispersed harmony” because the voices are typically widely spaced, this style is driven contrapuntally rather than harmonically. In addition to the preference for melodic writing in all voices, dissonances are avoided, chords are diatonic and often lack thirds, and harmonies are usually static or move in small, frequently non-progressive patterns until the cadence.
3 Henry Lowell Mason, Hymn-tunes of Lowell Mason, a Bibliography (Cambridge: The University Press, 1944), 14. 4 Messages on the Fasola Discussions listserv on February 12-17, 2014 confirm that nobody else does, either. Several singers doing independent research on this issue all wound up at the same dead end that I did. 5 Amos Pilsbury, The United States’ Sacred Harmony (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1799), 1. 6 George Pullen Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes” (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1933, reprinted by Dover editions), 209-10. 7 Ibid., 209-10.
120 Comparing Mason’s original “Boylston” (example 6.1)8 and the version that appeared in the fourth edition of The Sacred Harp (example 6.2)9 we find that, given Jackson’s definition, “Boylston” seems to have been southernized somewhat badly. As expected, the tenor’s melody is untouched. The bass is very nearly so, with only two altered pitches, both in the second phrase. Mason’s alto line already had nearly as much melodic interest as even a Southern alto can hope for, and so one would not expect to see terribly dramatic changes. Most notably, the rising arch in White’s second phrase appears to have been based on what had been the treble part in Mason’s version.
Example 6.1: “Boylston,” The Choir or Union Collection of Church Music (1835)
Example 6.2: “Boylston,” The Sacred Harp, fourth edition
8 Lowell Mason, The Choir (Boston: Hendee Carter, 1834, Special Collections, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida), 165. 8 Note: Mason's original also included a second ending with a more conclusive final cadence, but as Sacred Harp arrangements only seem to have been based on the first ending, I have omitted the second here for space. This omission also reflects the version published in the New Sacred Harp (1884), which was likely the source by which later revisers became familiar with Mason's version. 9 B. F White and E. J. King, The Sacred Harp, fourth edition (Atlanta, 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 447.
121 Mason’s treble was most in need of revision, as it includes accidentals to create secondary dominants. Such harmonies are atypical in dispersed harmony, and the sharps were omitted when the phrase was refitted to the alto. Overall, the treble is by far the most heavily altered part, and the editor appears to have taken inspiration from the treble’s mostly melodically stagnant opening phrase to produce a new part with less melodic interest than the original. Apart from the unusually large leap of a major sixth introduced in the second phrase, the treble is smoothed out to hover around the tonic rather than shifting between the dominant and tonic. The resulting loss of melodic interest runs counter to what one might expect of a southernized tune. Despite these changes, fairly little “violence” is done to the harmony. The second phrase’s secondary dominants become ii7 chords and the tonally logical tonic at the start of that phrase becomes vi due to the change in the bass, but otherwise the progressions are largely unchanged. This “Boylston” additionally lacks the open fifths and octaves normally associated with dispersed harmony, even adding a third that had been missing from Mason’s original. So, although it was altered from Mason’s original, B. F. White’s “Boylston” may not be tidily described as being in dispersed harmony due to its complete triads, reasonably tonal chord progressions, and boring treble. As it is included in a nineteenth-century Sacred Harp, however, it is undeniably a part of the Sacred Harp tradition, and therefore any assumption that B. F. White’s books contained only dispersed harmony is unsupported. By the same token, since this and similar tunes were introduced in the last of White’s editions, the issue arises of whether the later inclusion of more “modern” harmony represented a break from tradition or the continuation of an established trend.10 “Boylston” appeared in every twentieth-century revision of The Sacred Harp, and each tunebook line includes at least one unique version of the tune. The twentieth-century publishers additionally had at least one other source version, as Mason’s original was printed nearly verbatim in a small, supplemental book called The New Sacred Harp published in 1884 by two of B. F. White’s sons, B. F. White, Jr. and J. L. White.11 The versions of “Boylston” that appear in all subsequent Sacred Harp revisions suggest that in all cases the editor was familiar with Mason’s original harmonies and counterpoint.
10 Robert Vaughan suggested this very possibility in Rethinkin’ our Thinkin’: Thoughts on Sacred Harp ‘Myths’ (Mount Enterprise, TX: Waymark Publications, 2012), 22. 11 B. F. [Jr.] and J. L. White, The New Sacred Harp (No publisher given, 1884, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 74. Mason’s “Boylston” also appears in the 1867 Christian Harmony with a few choosing notes added (p. 35), but otherwise identical to the original.
122 The first Sacred Harp revision was the first edition of the Cooper Sacred Harp, printed in 1902. The first Cooper version of “Boylston” (example 6.3)12 was edited by B. P. Poyner, an active singer and composer in that community. The most immediately obvious modification is the meter change, a feature unique to the Cooper “Boylston.” Poyner changed the meter from 3/2 to 4/4. To refit the tune to the new meter, the whole notes at the end of the first, second and fourth phrases are reduced to half notes. I suspect this change may be related to tempo. If the tune is sung very slowly, the whole notes could become extremely long, and the tune would be challenging to lead effectively if beating time to the half note. Cooper singers today often prefer relatively slow tempos, and may sing this particular tune at almost half the tempo of Denson singers. The meter change may indicate that this tendency for singers in Cooper book territories to sing relatively slowly predates the Cooper book itself.
Example 6.3: “Boylston,” The Sacred Harp (1902)
In addition to changing the meter, Poyner also modified voice parts, creating an arguably more effective southernization than the version published by B. F. White. As before, the tenor is unchanged. The bass has only one of White’s two altered pitches, and it has a unique change, also in the second phrase. The treble overall more closely resembles Mason’s version than B. F. White’s. The secondary dominants are still removed from the second phrase, however, and the third phrase is more reminiscent of the version in the previous Sacred Harp with its rise to E. Poyner was likely trying to fuse what he regarded as the best elements of each version. The alto is also modified, though it still more closely resembles White’s version. In general, those instances where the alto
12 Wilson Marion Cooper, The B. F. White Sacred Harp (Dothan, AL: W. M. Cooper & Co., 1902, Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas), 447.
123 differs from the previous Sacred Harp move the voice to E, often with curious harmonic consequences. Whereas the “Boylston” printed in the Sacred Harp fourth edition largely preserved Mason’s harmony, Poyner’s version does significant “violence” to it, producing harmonies that were foreign even to Sacred Harp singing. Mason’s first secondary dominant moving to the dominant in the second phrase became two cluster chords. The next chord, previously a deceptive motion to vi, became another startling dissonance. At the end of the phrase, the V chord at the end of what was a half cadence is now a iii6, thanks to the alto. The V at the beginning of the fourth phrase is also transformed into a iii, this time with an added seventh. While dispersed harmony tunes usually are not bound by the rules and patterns of tonal harmony, they also usually do not contain such dissonances and typically do use half and authentic cadences. I suspect that the Cooper book “Boylston” was an attempt to bring the tune more in line with antebellum stylistic values that suffered from poor proofreading. Such issues are still part of the Sacred Harp experience, and singers often pass on corrections through the oral tradition. Although this “Boylston” was printed in the Cooper Sacred Harp editions until 2006, by the end of the twentieth century many altos were not singing the tune as printed. A recording from the 2006 Mount Pisgah convention in Stroud, Alabama, held before the release of the 2006 edition, confirms that the E at the end of the second phrase and beginning of the fourth phrase was being sung as D, restoring the V chords.13 There are some variations in the practice. In recordings from Texas in the early 1990s, the alto is sung as written.14 In Ken Williard’s recording of the Lee family’s first public all-day singing in a generation, at least one alto is singing most of the second phrase on D.15 The version of “Boylston” that J. L. White published in his 1911 Sacred Harp is identical to the version published in B. F. White’s fourth edition. There is, however, a unique revision of “Boylston” included in both the 1909 and 1910 revisions that demonstrates both his commitment to his father’s work as well as his desire to update the Sacred Harp style. J. L. White’s “Boylston” (example 6.4) actually changes his father’s “Boylston” very little.16 In m. 3 of the treble, White removed the awkward major sixth leap by changing the high E to a C. This eliminated the need for
13 Mount Pisgah Sacred Harp convention, Stroud, Alabama, 2006, recorded by Bobby Watkins. From the private collection of Morgan Bunch. 14 “Boylston, Marion Grant (1990)” and “447a Boylston – 1991 E. Texas Convention, Sunday,” Sacred Harp Memories, Vimeo Account. http://vimeo.com/fasola, accessed February 23, 2014. 15 Sacred Harp: Hoboken, Georgia 1996, compact disk, © 1999 Swamp Productions. 16 J. L. White, The Sacred Harp (1909, National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Georgia), new 84. J.L. White, The Sacred Harp, Fourth Edition with Supplement (no publisher information, 1911, the Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta), 447.
124 passing tones to the B natural at the cadence, so the final beat of m. 3 was simply changed to a half note on C. Although this did nothing to add melodic interest to the treble, it does remove what was probably a challenging leap for many singers. White also restored Mason’s original treble in the penultimate measure, and with it the thirdless G chord in the final cadence, but retained the new added seventh in the alto. Perhaps the most telling change is to the alto’s second phrase. J. L. White reintroduced the secondary dominants in m. 3 that had been removed in the nineteenth-century southernization. This time they occur in the alto, as the original treble line had been shifted down a staff.
Example 6.4: “Boylston,” The Sacred Harp, fifth edition (1909 and 1910)
The restoration of the F-sharps demonstrates J. L. White’s commitment to more “modern” harmonies. In this sense, his version is truer to Mason’s “Boylston,” and therefore in opposition to the conventional Sacred Harp styles. But, if White was interested in a total revision, he could have simply reprinted Mason’s “Boylston.” Instead, he chose to update his father’s “Boylston,” producing a tune that would still be familiar to Sacred Harp singers used to B. F. White’s version but also included a bit of the more modern harmony that J. L. White wanted to incorporate into Sacred Harp singing. Since the F-sharp in this version resolves to G in both chords, J. L. White’s version is actually more tonally correct than Mason’s original. On the other hand, the restoration of part of Mason’s treble in the penultimate measure, removing the critical leading tone in the final cadence, might represent a nod to the nineteenth-century stylistic conventions. Joe S. James insisted that the competing “pretended revisions” were full of improper changes and tainted with modern harmonies and styles that had no business in true Sacred Harp tunebooks, which, in the opinion of many of White’s students, must contain only dispersed harmony. As I have already shown, however, the nineteenth-century books were slightly more
125 stylistically diverse than James claimed. Additionally, “Boylston” shows that not everything in James’s Sacred Harp revision was really about the preservation of Sacred Harp tradition. To understand this, we must backtrack slightly to his Union Harp and History of Songs, published two years earlier in 1909. This book is not a Sacred Harp and was intended as a supplement,17 but it included another “Boylston” that clearly influenced the version James printed in his Sacred Harp. The Union Harp “Boylston” (example 6.5) more closely resembles Mason’s original than B. F. White’s version.18 The second phrase, however, contains material that is unique to James. Where Mason had his first secondary dominant, the Union Harp instead has a vi, which then moves to a vii/vi and back to vi. This brief tonicization of the relative minor, perhaps inspired by the vi at the opening of the second phrase in the B.F. White version, is aurally striking and musically novel, from a harp singing perspective. Not only was James the only Sacred Harp publisher to use a secondary chord in “Boylston” other than the V/V, he also introduced a new accidental, the G-sharp in the treble. One could hardly describe this extremely distinctive passage as traditional dispersed harmony, but it is very lovely.
Example 6.5: The Union Harp and History of Songs (1909)
This signature G-sharp was included in the version of “Boylston” that James printed in his Sacred Harp (example 6.6),19 which is otherwise identical to the version in the Sacred Harp fourth edition. When the first Denson edition was published in 1936, it also included this version of “Boylston,” although it was moved from its original page, 447 on the top, to page 147. In the
17 Joe S. James, Union Harp and History of Songs (Atlanta: Joe S. James, 1909, National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Georgia), vii. 18 James, Union Harp, 27. 19 Joe S. James, Original Sacred Harp (Atlanta: Joe S. James, 1911), 447. Original Sacred Harp (Haleyville, AL: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, Inc., 1936, National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Georgia), 147.
126 James/Denson “Boylston,” the leading tone function of the G-sharp is lost, as the next note in the treble line is a leap to the high E, not a step to the adjacent A. The G-natural in the alto adds a clear harmonic conflict. The decision to include the G-sharp in the treble is then mystifying both melodically and harmonically, especially as it is the only altered pitch in the entire tune. Presumably,
vii even though he wanted to be as “traditional” as possible, James was proud of his vi chord. As he felt that his edition was most true to the elder White’s original work, he needed to use B. F. White’s “Boylston,” but he wanted to include this one small element of his own arrangement. As in the Cooper edition, a bit more careful proofreading might have been prudent.
Example 6.6: “Boylston,” Original Sacred Harp (1911)
Of course, “Boylston” is only one tune, and it is unreasonable to attempt to describe an entire book on the basis of a single piece. It is also worth noting that revising “Boylston” has become something of a tradition, and recent editions of both tunebooks contain still more versions of the tune. This analysis shows the dangers of trying to pigeonhole Sacred Harp tunebook lines into simple categories vis-à-vis traditionalism. The version of “Boylston” published in B. F. White’s final Sacred Harp is stylistically problematic, perhaps even non-traditional, if one incorrectly assumes that all the tunes in the nineteenth-century Sacred Harp are written in dispersed harmony. “Boylston” is one of a handful of tunes added in the fourth edition that suggest White may have been moving toward the inclusion of more modern harmonies and styles. Poyner’s version of “Boylston” printed in the 1902 Cooper book suggests that Cooper and Poyner were well familiar with the traditional style. Although it was not in dispersed harmony either, this version did destroy tonal harmony rather than introducing it, and arguably moved “Boylston” more in line with antebellum Southern tradition by valuing melody for all over tonal progressions. J. L. White’s “Boylston” is a careful balance between the tradition of his father’s music and the reforms first promoted by Lowell Mason and his
127 like. As for James’s version, he very nearly reprinted B. F. White’s “Boylston” but could not resist adding one small touch that reflects his own pride as a composer and arranger more than the continuation of tradition. All three tunebook lines recognized the stylistic problems of “Boylston” as an antebellum hymn tune, and their ongoing experiments to correct it are a reflection of the anxieties that result from a diaspora under pressure from outside forces. Where they differ is in what their priorities are as they attempt to correct their problems.
128 CHAPTER 7
EPILOGUE: THE SACRED HARP DIASPORA
After the Atlanta-area book wars of 1911, there was a lull in Sacred Harp revisions. The First World War likely dampened any enthusiasm for work on Sacred Harp revisions, and individual compilers had their own reasons as well: Cooper passed away after 1916 and his family seems to have suffered financially for a number of years, J. L. White was probably disillusioned after his fights with James and his supporters, and the emphasis on older tunes and traditionalism combined with a sense of this “original” book as an authoritative text would not promote the idea that the James book would need to be revised any time soon. White would never release another new Sacred Harp edition after 1911, although that book has been reprinted periodically since that time. The James book would be reprinted but not revised until after his death, when the rights were purchased by two brothers, S. M. and T. J. Denson. They, too, would pass before their book’s publication. The Denson book is rooted in the nostalgia-based work of James, but continues it in a way that is less stylistically extreme.
The Cooper Book After Cooper
By 1917, the Blackshears had left south Florida and were living in Panama City, and the 1920 census lists them as living in rental property. Presumably R. D. Blackshear’s citrus business had failed. According to James in 1920, Cooper’s heirs had yet to pay all the fees stemming from the court case of 1914, and a lien had been placed on Cooper’s estate, including his Sacred Harp plates.1 R. D. Blackshear was involved in another court case regarding a property dispute that was heard by the Alabama Supreme Court in 1921. When he moved to Florida, Blackshear still owned property in Dothan, on which he had three mortgages. He lost the property to foreclosure in 1916 but asked a wealthy cousin, Dr. J. A. B. Sikes, to purchase the property back from the bank. Sikes was suffering from throat cancer and near the end of his life. In August of 1917, Sikes traveled to Panama City, where he transferred the deed to Anna Blackshear; the court notes that this was “so her husband’s creditors could not trouble it.” The Blackshears must not have had the cash at the time for the full price of the property; Sikes took a more than $4,000 loss. He died at the end of September of that
1 Joe S. James, “An Explanation of The Sacred Harp Printed and Published by B. F. White and E. J. King in 1844,” (Pamphlet, Atlanta, Ga., August 9, 1920, from the private collection of Robert Vaughan), 3.
129 year and left his estate to his three sisters. The executor of Sikes’s estate claimed that the deed was a forgery created by Blackshear, although the court ultimately found in Blackshear’s favor.2 These financial difficulties may explain why the Cooper line went so long without a revision, as well as the loss of Cooper himself and the disruption of the First World War. The next revision was finally released in 1927, and it demonstrates some uneasiness in the Cooper book community about leadership. There are multiple editions of the 1927 book, with slightly different information on each. The probable first printing, the “Ninth Edition,” lists R. D. Blackshear of Panama City, Florida, as the owner and publisher. Blackshear was not on the 1927 revision committee, however, and there is no indication that he participated in or contributed toward the revision of this or any other Sacred Harp.3 There is another version of the ninth edition that was owned and published by three Alabama men: B. P. Poyner of Dothan, and W. M. and B. F. Faust of Ozark. It is not clear if these books were published concurrently or if the Blackshears bowed out after the first printing.4 In later printings of this revision, ownership of the book passed to the Poyner family exclusively.5 The 1927 revision added almost seventy new tunes in a new appendix, with almost no changes made to the existing book. There is nothing remarkable about the new additions, although it is worth noting that three tunes, all fuging tunes, were contributed by two authors from Texas. This demonstrates the high quality of the singing in that state, as well as the Cooper book’s use outside of south Alabama. There were some changes occurring in the world of the Sacred Harp singers, but these were social rather than musical. The Ozark newspaper The Southern Star included announcements and minutes for many local singings, both all day singings as well as afternoon sessions held after church services. The paper is a fascinating window into the vibrant singing culture that existed in the Ozark area at the time. Although there is no clear sense of how many attended each singing, the sheer number of events demonstrates that opportunities to sing were frequent, particularly in the spring and summer, with a
2 Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Alabama, Volume 206 (West Publishing Company, 1922), 673- 5. 3 W. M. Cooper, attr., The Sacred Harp (Panama City, FL: owned and published by Dr. R. D. Blackshear, 1927, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 525. 4 W. M. Cooper, attr., The Sacred Harp (owned and published by B. P. Poyner, Dothan, AL; W. M. Faust, Ozark, AL; and B. F. Faust, Ozark, AL, 1927, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), front cover. 5 Robert Vaughn, Songs Before Unknown: A Companion to The Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition, 2012 (forthcoming book, draft from February 2014, courtesy of the author).
130 peak in July. Singings were not always strictly local affairs; the report on a July singing at Snow Hill mentioned visiting singers from Florida and Texas.6 The singings were described in many ways. The announcements were usually fairly straightforward, occasionally with a touch of humor.
Notice to Singers There will be a Sacred Harp singing at Bethel Church, near Echo next Sunday evening beginning at 1:30. Uncle Josh Lisenby says come, the community says come and who so ever will let him come and take part in the singing freely.7
***
Singing at Antioch Second Sunday in July There will be an all-day Sacred Harp singing at Antioch church 3 miles south of Clio, the second Sunday in July. Everybody is invited to come and bring their books and baskets.8
***
Notice to Sacred Harp Singers There will be an all day Sacred Harp singing at the Carroll Church next Sunday on the self- sustaining plan.9
Singing minutes were usually given in similarly straightforward language.
Fifth Sunday Singing at Ozark The fifth Sunday in January being the time which had been previously announced for a Sacred Harp singing. A large crowd of singers had arrived at the M. P. Church by 1:30, and the former chairman, B. F. Faust, called them to order by singing two songs. Prayer was offered by H. A. W. Martin. The following officers were elected for the year: G. L. Beck, president; R. M. Davis, Vice-President; R. J. Davis, Secretary; Arranging committee: B. F. Faust, H. A. W. And H. A. W. Martin was elected Chaplin. Three songs were sung by A. J. Davis, while the committee arranged for music by four. First was by W. D. Adams, second by H. D. Hughes, third by H. I. Byrd and fourth by Z. E. Flowers. Recess five minutes.
6 The Southern Star v. 60 no. 20 July 20, 1927 p 2. 7 Southern Star v. 60 no. 6, Wednesday February 9th, 1927 p. 4. “Uncle Josh” appears to have been a local celebrity who frequently preached at singings. He seems to have been an elderly man and in need of community support, as the hat was sometimes passed for him. 8 Ibid. v. 60 no. 25 June 22 p. 7. 9 Southern Star v. 60 no. 30 July 27 p. 8.
131 Called to order by the chairman, G. L. Beck and A. B. Flowers were appointed to sing three songs. Then music by five: O. J. Byrd, M. T. Heath, J. F. Brown, W. M. Lisenby, and R. M. Davis. Recess five minutes. Called to order by the chairman, and W. M. Smith sang three songs, after which music by five: Jonnie Theweatt, S. J. Byrd, C. W. Poyner, C. W. Byrd and B. P. Poyner. Closing song and prayer by H. A. W. Martin. All lovers of Sacred music are invited to be with us every fifth Sunday afternoon at the M. P. church Ozark, Ala. We are expecting 1927 to be a great year for Sacred Harp singers, and trust that all singers will cooperate in making it so. G. L. Beck, President, R. J. Davis, Secretary.10
If the singing was honoring an individual, living or dead, then that part of the description tended to be more elaborate, with much more nostalgic language. Of course, this makes sense in the context of a memorial; these reports are part minutes and part eulogy.
Singing at Godwin School House Sunday The third Sunday in April 1927, being the time for the annual singing at the Godwin School House, which began twelve years ago under the influence of Mrs. J. N. Snell, who was a great lover of Sacred music and in the first singing she expressed herself as being so happy that she wanted to shout aloud the joys of her heart and as the death angel visited her home before another year and took her to her long sweet rest. This singing have been perpetuated from year to year until this good day and a great host of people having gathered the President called the class to order at 9 o’clock…11
***
Snow Hill Memorial Singing About four years ago, Mr. J. L. Miller, requested that the Snow Hill community set a day apart in honor and memory of the late, Wm. H. Lisenby, the noted sacred harp singer of his day and the person who first organized a sacred harp singing in this country. The request was made known, and advertised for the third Sunday in May… On last third Sunday, May 15th was another glorious day and a day that will be long remembered by those who attended this memorial service. The Sunday school opened at 9:30 and then Uncle Josh Lisenby, son of the late Wm. H. Lisenby in whose honor and memory the day was set apart preached one of the richest sweetest and soul-stirring sermons ever witnessed at Snow Hill. Uncle Josh appealed to the vast congregation the need of old time repentance. He made it so plain and so necessary until you could feel the mighty power of God moving on the hearts of the people. He stressed the need of Sabbath observance, that the same God that wrote the words, Thou Shalt not Kill, wrote to keep His Sabbath. He said that it was as
10 Southern Star v. 60 no. 5 February 2, 1927, p 7. 11 Southern Star v. 60 no. 15 Wednesday, April 13 1927, p 6
132 much wrong to make a trip on the Sabbath to save having to make on a day of the week, where made on business, as to plow or do any other work. He said to keep open stores, garages, or to do any thing on the Sabbath for personal gain, that it was as much wrong as to work at any other occupation, proving his statement by the Word of God. His sermon was of the olden type, full of every day common sense and reason, and we believe it will prove a blessing in this country in years after Uncle Josh has passed away. …12
The sheer number of singings, together with the matter-of-fact language used to describe them, suggests that for the most part, Sacred Harp singing was viewed as routine for singers in the rural area around Ozark; it was a thing one did on Sundays, particularly in the warmer months. Nostalgic language is mostly reserved for people associated with Sacred Harp rather than with the practice itself. There is, however, one notable exception to this general rule in the announcement for a July singing in Dothan.
All Day Singing We are going to have an all-day Sacred Harp singing at the Court House in Dothan on the first Sunday in July and will have to ask all who attend to bring their baskets. At eleven o’clock we will have a preaching service conducted by one of the oldest preachers in this country, the Rev. Joshua Lisenby of Echo, Alabama. He is a good man and an old time pioneer preacher. We will have old time singing at this service, lining out the hymns as of old with the congregation joining in. Everybody is invited to come and go back fifty years to the days of old- time religion. I am sure you will enjoy it. Respectfully, B. P. Poyner13
This announcement has a different tone from those for other singings. The venue is unusual, since this singing was to be held at a courthouse, rather than at a church. This would suggest that the function is a bit more like a civic occasion, and makes it seem a bit grander. Poyner also uses “Uncle Josh’s” full name, Joshua, which is more formal, and he calls him not only an old time preacher, language used to describe him in other announcements, but also a pioneer preacher. This suggests both a connection to the past, as well as rural life without the complications and corruptions of the modern city and town. The final paragraph is particularly loaded with nostalgia, as Poyner invites the reader to “go back fifty years to the days of old time religion.” In this case, the event is explicitly marketed not only as a singing, but also as a nostalgic attraction. The reference to lining out and use
12 Southern Star v 60 no 21 May 25, 1927, p 5 13 Southern Star v. 60 no. 26 June 29 p 5
133 of the term congregation also suggests that the format of the event might be somewhat unusual. This is also the only singing advertised in the Southern Star that year to be held in Dothan; the rest were in the surrounding rural area. Admittedly this is scant evidence, but I take the contrast in content, style, and tone between the Poyner notice for the Dothan sing and the notices for all the rural singings as a sign that the retrospective attitude was taking over in Dothan. For the singers in the rural areas like Ozark, Sacred Harp singing was still a pleasant activity that happened after church some Sundays, and maybe all Saturday. It happened frequently, especially during the summer. It was a way to foster a sense of community and love for one’s neighbors, and occasionally an opportunity to pass the hat for people and institutions in need. Although there is some importance placed on the way singing had been handed down from previous generations and singings would sometimes memorialize those who had passed, this does not seem to have been a primary reason why people were drawn to the singings. Sacred Harp singing was still a routine activity in the Ozark area, but that was not the case in Dothan. By 1927, Dothan newspapers that had once covered major Sacred Harp events in the city no longer mentioned them, including Poyner’s event. The city was an urban center, if a small one, and it seems that Sacred Harp singing must have drifted out of its cultural mainstream.
The Denson Book
The James book was reprinted a few times with minor revisions, but there would never be a second edition. This is not surprising, given that James seemed to intend his book to be the authoritative text of a tradition that was fundamentally rooted in the past. He was less interested in the inclusion of new material, with a strong emphasis on not just the style, but also the repertoire of the previous century; about half the tunes he added to his Original Sacred Harp were written before the Civil War. This is the most retrospective approach of all, and ultimately would probably not have been successful in the long term. Revisions and new tunes were always a part of the Sacred Harp tradition. Not only does the inclusion of new tunes allow Sacred Harp singers to add their own creative geniuses to the work, it also often serves to memorialize each generation; composers often named tunes in honor of prominent leaders or other composers, passing their names on to the next generation. Twenty-five years after James first released his book, a committee led by S. M. and T. J. Denson released a new Original Sacred Harp that moderated the conservative, deeply retrospective practice of James and continued the tunebook line as a living tradition.
134 The Denson revision is smaller and lighter than the James book, with almost 100 fewer pages. This made the book much easier to hold, particularly during an all-day singing. Of course, with fewer pages, they also had to cut many tunes, including almost half the tunes that James had added. For the Denson brothers, a tune’s age alone was not enough to give it value: “In order to reduce the size of the book and give space for music by present-day writers it has been necessary to leave out some music contained in the last revision, and the task of selecting the music to be removed was difficult, though much of it was never used, and some was rarely used.” An old tune that was not being sung was not worth keeping at the expense of including a high-quality new tune in the correct style. Still, even though a relatively new tune had a better chance of making the cut than an antebellum one, the Denson book kept a significant number of the older tunes, and many are still in use today. Daniel Read’s “Russia,” for example, was cut from one of B. F. White’s revisions, reintroduced in the James book, kept in the first Denson book, and remains a popular tune today.
Table 7.1: New tunes in the James book cut vs. kept in the 1936 Denson book Cut Kept Composed before the Civil War 23 (56%) 18 (44%) Composed after the Civil War 16 (37%) 28 (63%)
Scanning through a list of the new tunes, it becomes apparent that the pool of composers contributing new tunes to the Denson book was fairly small. Of the approximately forty new tunes, 46% were written by a member of the Denson family, and 22% were written by McGraws, another important twentieth-century Sacred Harp family. The James book had been similarly Denson- dominated. It is possible that James’s emphasis on retrospection actually stunted the development of the next generation of Sacred Harp composers, with composition only fostered in a few particularly active and talented families. It is also possible that this community was somewhat elitist and generally only valued new work from this inner circle. Still, the new rudiments section in the Denson book, written by T. J. Denson’s son Paine, included a brief section on composition to help teach the next generation. The Denson family’s musical skill did not lie only with its male members; the Denson women were unusually active in the Sacred Harp leadership. Denson women contributed to the James book, but less visibly. There were only two new tunes plus one treble part attributed to women in 1911, by
135 Mrs. Sidney Denson and Mrs. Amanda Denson, who were sisters (née Burdette) as well as the wives of S. M. and T. J. Denson, respectively. James attributed his new alto lines to S. M. Denson, but in addition to cribbing from Cooper, it is widely believed that many of the James alto lines originated with these women, particularly Amanda, even though James did not give them any credit.14 Sidney Denson was possibly the first woman to lead a lesson at the Chattahoochee convention, a very large, old convention west of Atlanta.15 Sidney and Amanda Denson were both outlived by their husbands and gone long before 1936, but the next generation made their own contribution: the 1936 book contained one tune each tune by Amanda and T. J. Denson’s three daughters, Annie, Maggie, and Ruth. All three women had married by this time, but their last names were hyphenated: Mrs. Annie Denson-Aaron, Mrs. Maggie Denson-Cagle, and Mrs. Ruth Denson-Edwards. Although both Maggie and Ruth’s marriages had failed, it is highly unlikely that any of these women actually went by both their maiden and married names; it is far more likely that T. J. Denson wanted to make sure that everyone knew to whose family these women belonged. The Denson sisters were also on the revision committee, along with another hyphenated Denson woman, Mrs. Vera Denson-Nunn, and three other women, Mrs. D. Ivie Hendrix, Mrs. Ila McMahan, and Mrs. George D. Hamrick. Although they were a relatively small percentage of a fairly large committee with over sixty members, the number was unprecedented in Sacred Harp to this point. The presence of the non-Denson women on the committee indicates that the Denson family was receptive to the contributions of many willing and able women, not only their own wives and daughters. Many of the more conservative/retrospective elements of the James book are retained in the Denson book, including the title, Original Sacred Harp, with only a subtitle added, “Denson Revision.” James’s complaint about the harmony of his competitors’ books is echoed in the Denson book’s introduction, which boasts in all caps that it “retains both the popular four shaped notes and TRUE DISPERSED harmony…”16 True to their word, the Denson book did not add tunes in modern styles, and the problematic tune “Mendelssohn” was among the tunes that were cut. The Denson revision also retains James’s scripture quotations and histories, which contributed to establishing the Sacred Harp mythology in the minds of every singer. While these may have been preserved to honor James and his contributions, it seems unlikely that they would have been saved if
14 David Warren Steel, The Makers of the Sacred Harp (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 105. 15 Ibid., 109. 16 Original Sacred Harp: Denson Revision (Haleyville, AL: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, Inc., 1936, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.), 10.
136 they had not had some intrinsic value to the Densons and their committee, given the reduction of the book’s size overall. The Denson brothers took the core values of the James book but slimmed it down to a more manageable size, allowed and acknowledged the contributions of women, and reinforced that the introduction of new compositions is still an important part of continuing Sacred Harp singing as a living tradition. ****** In his Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong, John Bealle noted that “Already in the 1850s, Sacred Harp musical practice was being constructed on a foundation of deeply experienced fellowship and the quality of praise that singing could invoke.”17 By the twentieth century, Sacred Harp singing had taken on another important social role. Safran’s sixth characteristic of a diaspora, the “diaspora consciousness,” describes a group of people who “…continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.”18 The act of Sacred Harp singing served as the means by which Sacred Harp singers could maintain their relationship to the homeland, both to the antebellum musical practices and, more generally, to the idealized, mythologized antebellum culture. Sacred Harp singing served as a way to embody the past, and it promoted community formation around a shared remnant of that lost past. All the twentieth-century Sacred Harp revisions are fundamentally diasporic. They retain the title Sacred Harp, they connect back to the work and legacy of B. F. White, they use the repertoire of his nineteenth-century books as a core, and, as White directed, they still use four-shape notation and teach primarily four-syllable solmization. By the early twentieth century, all Sacred Harp singers could have easily joined the Ruebush-Kieffer Musical Million and switched to seven shapes, but something about the antebellum practice of their ancestors compelled them to resist. The Sacred Harp therefore became the core of this musical diaspora, and the practice of Sacred Harp singing became a living way for communities to connect to their past. While diasporas share a homeland or symbol as a binding core, they are also separated by the different lands in which its members have settled. In the case of the Sacred Harp diaspora, the dispersal is less about geography, although geography does play a role, especially for Cooper singers. More importantly, though, the Sacred Harp diaspora was separated by different philosophies about what kinds of compromises with the hostland of the present were necessary for the tradition to survive.
17 John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 143. 18 William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1:1 (Spring 1991): 84.
137 The most divisive compromises were in style and repertoire, specifically the inclusion or exclusion of the “close harmony” styles of Northern reform hymns and gospel song. Both Cooper and J. L. White were willing to include gospel song, which was also, in some ways, a nostalgic style. Southern gospel was developed in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the frequent use of agrarian images and nostalgic language were meant to appeal to the former Confederates who mourned a lost, “innocent,” agrarian past. The gospel songs found in Sacred Harp revisions tend to be in the relatively simple style of the nineteenth century; twentieth-century gospel songs became more chromatic and more rhythmically active. The gospel hybridization found in the Cooper book suggests that both antebellum and early gospel existed side-by-side in his community, a routine practice of two retrospective styles. For James and others, though, gospel song was tainted by the perceived greed of gospel publishers, whose musical evangelism at the helm of often large companies tended to net a tidy fortune. Gospel therefore lacked the moral purity of antebellum amateurism. Northern reform hymns do not seem to have had any connection to nostalgia, even though they, too, come from an antebellum movement. They have no ties to rural agrarianism and instead represented an urban movement based on education and Europeanization. The European element was less explicit when Southern compilers began adopting the same philosophies and tunes after the Civil War, but they still aimed to “correct” an older style and explicitly marketed their work as well suited for the city as well as the country. These tunes are therefore the most stylistically problematic in a retrospective book, and could be a much more extreme compromise. B. F. White himself began adding a few in his final edition, however, and “Boylston” seems to have been a particularly sticky issue for tunebook compilers to resolve. In Sacred Harp, the Northern reform style is particularly associated with J. L. White, who seems to have had some desire to reform Sacred Harp singing in the same way that William Walker’s Christian Harmony was a reform of the Southern Harmony. It is possible that for the younger White, following his father’s directive to preserve the four-shape system was really a spoonful of sugar to help Sacred Harp singers swallow more important harmonic reforms. James and other singers lacked White’s relatively fancy training, however, and did not value his reform. Each of White’s books became less progressive as the singing population pushed back. James’s extremely retrospective approach to Sacred Harp revision could not have been more different from White’s attempted reform. The extremeness of their reactions, as compared to Cooper, likely was a result of the foreignness of their hostland. Cooper lived in Dothan, a rapidly growing but still small city in an area with unusually peaceful race relations, whereas the Atlanta area
138 was assaulted with everything from race riots to summer seasons of the New York Metropolitan Opera. Since the pressures of modernity were stronger in that area, so too were the reactions of the leaders in the Sacred Harp diaspora communities. Another key area of compromise was in gender roles. Some women were beginning to play an increasingly visible role in society. The passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 was a major victory for women who sought to have more influence in the country’s affairs. All three tunebook publishers added the alto; universally in the Cooper, nearly universally in the James, and in all new tunes in the White. This ladies-only part would have substantially changed the sound of the singing, as the part is ideally belted in the chest voice and is so powerful that a few good altos can usually hold their own against much larger treble, tenor, and bass sections. Women were literally being heard in a totally new way. Carl Carmer’s experience aside, the part was adopted so quickly in many areas that within a generation its absence was unimaginable. Women still represented a relatively small percentage of the active composers, but they began to contribute in other ways, from the alto lines of Mrs. R. D. Blackshear, to Sydney Denson leading a lesson at the Chattahoochee convention, to her nieces serving on the Denson book revision committee. Not only were these women participating and contributing, but they were recognized for doing so. Cooper’s book is filled with the names of women because he was so careful to cite the composers of each new alto line, regardless of her gender. Unfortunately, such considerations were not always universal. Amanda and Sidney Denson’s work on the James revision was not recognized in print until decades later, and it is difficult to say how many women similarly made contributions to Sacred Harp singing over the years without acknowledgement. The more equal participation of the whole family, mother included, likely served to strengthen the already key function of community formation and fellowship that Sacred Harp and other tunebook singing had promoted from the very beginning. So, too, did the blossoming diaspora consciousness. Now when Sacred Harp singers gathered in the hollow square, they were enjoying fellowship and praising God, but also participating in an arcane ritual that separated them from the more modern Southerners surrounding them. Singing Sacred Harp gave people a way to connect to a mythologized noble and peaceful past and live it in their troubled present. It also made them special, with a kind of “ancient” knowledge that had been lost by those in the surrounding area. The formation of the Sacred Harp diaspora was an expression of the cultural exile that many white Southerners felt at the time, an “uprooting” in a “cyclone of social change,” as Woodward put it. It was not the only nostalgic musical practice; nostalgia also plays a significant role in Southern
139 gospel, for example, and as the new century wore on, fiddling contests and the “hillbilly music” on early radio that would form the roots of country music were also ways by which modern men and women could connect to a lost rural past.19 I think Sacred Harp is unique, however, in the emphasis on community building that remains an important element in that practice today. Also, although the singers may be nostalgic for different things now, I think the nostalgia and diaspora consciousness that shaped the early twentieth century continues to shape Sacred Harp singing today. Kiri Miller described “nontraditional” singers as a Sacred Harp diaspora, marked by their emphasis on the importance of travel to the South and interaction with Southern singers, as well as anxiety that their “foreign” practice might sully the Southern ideal. She notes that these singers often give Southern singers authority as tradition bearers to dictate the practice elsewhere, a role Southerners often accept.20 But, why would the Southern singers deeply concern themselves with how Sacred Harp is practiced elsewhere if they did not also feel the same anxieties as the new singers? Surely it would be easier to sell books and leave the newcomers be. Instead, the Southerners often insist on traditional Southern practices. In I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah!, Laura Clawson describes how in the early days of Chicago singing, some people who had been participating in Sacred Harp were turned off and never returned after a visit from the Georgian leader Hugh McGraw, who forcefully insisted on the observance of Southern practices.21 Although Sacred Harp singers want new members from all walks of life to join their community, admittedly an unusual feature in a diaspora, they simultaneously insist on enculturation. The anxieties and nostalgia that Miller observed in the new singers did not arise spontaneously; they were learned from the Southern tradition bearers, who at some level are still nostalgic for a lost past (although probably no longer an antebellum one) and fear the corrupting influence of the present.
19 See Gavin James Campbell, Music and the Making of a New South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 20 Kiri Miller, Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 33. 21 Laura Clawson, I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah!: Community, Spirituality, and Tradition Among Sacred Harp Singers (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2011), 121.
140 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tunebooks Cited
Cooper, W. M. The Sacred Harp. Dothan, AL.: W.M. Cooper & Co., 1902. Courtesy of the Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.
———. The Sacred Harp. Dothan, AL: Distributed by B. P. Poyner, 1909. Courtesy of Appalachian State University.
Cooper, W. M., attr. The Sacred Harp. Panama City, FL: owned and published by Dr. R. D. Blackshear, 1927. Courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.
———. The Sacred Harp. Owned and published by B. P. Poyner, Dothan, AL; W. M. Faust, Ozark, AL; and B. F. Faust, Ozark, AL, 1927. Courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, GA.
Holden, Oliver. The Union Harmony, vol I. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793. Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 25619 (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], accessed April 1, 2015.
Mason, Lowell. The Choir. Boston: Hendee Carter, 1834. From Special Collections, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida.
Jackson, Judge. The Colored Sacred Harp, ed. Judge Jackson. Published by Judge Jackson, Ozark, Alabama, 1934. Courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
James, Joe S. The Original Sacred Harp. Atlanta, 1911, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
———. Union Harp and History of Songs. Atlanta: Joe S. James, 1909, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
Jenks, Steven. The New England Harmonist. Danbury, CT: Douglas & Nichols, 1800. Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 37707 (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], accessed December 3, 2009.
[Jocelin, Simeon]. The Chorister’s Companion. New Haven, 1782. Accessed via Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 17988, (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], accessed April 2, 2015.
Original Sacred Harp: Denson Revision Haleyville, AL: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, Inc., 1936, courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
Read, Daniel. The American Singing Book. New Haven, 1785. Accessed via Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 19213 (filmed) [http://infoweb.newsbank.com], April 1, 2015.
141 Walker, William. The Christian Harmony. Philadelphia: published by E. W. Miller and William Walker, 1867. From the private collection of Jonathon Smith.
Walker, William, with Glenn C. Wilcox, ed. The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987. “Reproduced from a copy of the 1966 Pro Musicamaricana reprint, which was printed from original copies of the 1854 edition.”
White, B. F. and E. J. King. The Sacred Harp, fourth edition. Atlanta: 1870, reprinted Jas. L. White, 1897. Courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
White, B. F. [Jr.] and J. L. White. The New Sacred Harp. No publisher given, 1884. Courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
White, J. L. The Sacred Harp, fifth edition. No publisher given, 1909. Courtesy of the National Sacred Harp Museum, Carrollton, Ga.
———. The Sacred Harp, fifth edition. Atlanta, 1910. Courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University.
———. The Sacred Harp, fourth edition, with supplement. Atlanta, 1911. Courtesy of the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University.
Texts Cited
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.
Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Bagwell, James. The National Sacred Harp Foundation Archives: Transcriptions of Unpublished Manuscripts and Documents. M.M. Thesis, Florida State University, 1991.
Bailey, Kenneth K. Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Bealle, John. Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997.
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Brackney, William H. A Genetic History of Baptist Thought. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004.
Brobston, Stanley. A Brief History of White Southern Gospel Music and a Study of Selected Amateur Family Gospel Music Singing Groups in Rural Georgia. Ph. D. diss., New York University, 1977.
142 Broyles, Michael. Music of the Highest Class. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
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Campbell, James Gavin. Music and the Making of a New South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
———. “‘Old Can Be Used Instead of New’: Shape-Note Singing and the Crisis of Modernity in the New South.” The Journal of American Folklore 110, no. 436 (Spring 1997), 169-88.
Carmer, Carl. Stars Fell on Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1934, new edition 2000.
Cash, Wilbur J. The Mind of the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941.
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Clawson, Laura. I Belong to this Band, Hallelujah!: Community, Spirituality and Tradition Among Sacred Harp Singers. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Cobb, Buell E., Jr. Like Chords Around My Heart: A Sacred Harp Memoir. Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2014.
———. The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978.
Cobb, James C. Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Cooper, William J. and Thomas E. Terrill. The American South: A History, Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Crawford, Richard, ed. The Core Reparatory of Early American Psalmody. Madison: A-R Editions, 1984.
Crowley, John G. Primitive Baptists of the Wiregrass South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
Cusic, Bob. The Sound of Light: A History of Gospel Music. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990.
Daniel, Pete. Standing At the Crossroads: Southern Life since 1900. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.
143 Daw, S. F. “Age of Boys’ Puberty in Leipzig, 1727-49, as Indicated by Voice Breaking in J. S. Bach’s Choir Members.” Human Biology 42 no. 1 (1970): 87-9.
Dufoix, Stéphane. Diasporas. Berkley: University of California Press, 2008.
Dvořák, Antonín. Symphony No. 9, Op.95, ed. Otakar Šourek. Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1955. Accessed October 7, 2014, International Scores Music Library Project, http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/54080.
Eastburn, Kathryn. A Sacred Feast: Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Grounds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Ellington, Charles Linwood. The Sacred Harp Tradition of the South: Its Origin and Evolution. Ph. D. diss., Florida State University, 1969.
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150 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Sarah Kahre is a graduate of Appalachian State University (B.M., music performance, 2006) and Florida State University (M.M., music history, 2008). Her master’s thesis explored the career of W. S. Mason, a musician and educator whose work in the early twentieth century paved the way for the vibrant arts culture in her native Charleston, West Virginia. She has presented research at the Southern Graduate Music Research Symposium, annual meetings of the American Musicological Society Southeast and Southern chapters as well as the Society for Ethnomusicology Southeast Chapter, and at national meetings of the Society for American Music and the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has taught classes in music literature and music history for both music majors and general studies, and given many informal talks on Sacred Harp singing for music classes, ensembles, student organizations, and church groups. Although still a brass player at heart, Sarah has been a proud, obnoxious Sacred Harp alto since 2007. She lives in Tallahassee with her devoted cats, Pete and Zora.
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